"Bottomless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition; there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... trying to go down at random," said Jack, peering into its bottomless deeps. "Even if we didn't break our necks we'd get lost down there. My notion is for me to follow the bank in one direction an' for you to take the other. We might ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... hobbles would allow, the colt turned into one of the wildest parts of the forest, while its rider sat trembling at the strange sights he saw. Sometimes the earth seemed to open in front of them and he was looking into a bottomless pit; sometimes the trees burst into flames and he found himself in the midst of a fire; often in the act of crossing a stream the water rose and threatened to sweep him away; and again, at the foot of a mountain, great rocks ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... the truth of this, look back and compare Antichrist four hundred years ago, with Antichrist as he now is, and you shall see what work the Lord Jesus has begun to make with him; kingdoms and countries He hath taken from her. True, the fogs of Antichrist, and the smoke that came with him out of the bottomless pit, has eclipsed the glorious light of the Gospel; but you know, in eclipses, when they are recovering, all the creatures upon the face of the earth cannot put a stop to that course, until the sun or the moon have recovered their glory. And thus it shall be now, the Lord is returning to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... me, my heart is oppressed in a way that astonishes me, and I wallow in a bottomless melancholy, in spite of work, in spite of the good Saint-Antoine who ought to distract me. Is it the consequence of my repeated afflictions? Perhaps. But the war is a good deal responsible for it. I think that we are ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... to plan nor the courage to execute; and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... and a "Pan-European Railway, Exploration, and Civilisation Company" that let in light in dark places, and an "International Housing of the Poor Company," as well as a number of others. Somewhere at the bottom of these seemingly bottomless concerns, the Duc de Mersch was said to be moving, and the Hour certainly contained periodically complimentary allusions to their higher philanthropy and dividend-earning prospects. But that was as much as I knew. The same people—people one met in smoking-rooms—said ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... multitude whose nature we share, than the rubicund cheerfulness of some modern divines, who profess to unite a smiling liberalism with a well-bred and tacit but unshaken confidence in the reality of the bottomless pit. But, in fact, as Mr. Lecky maintains, that awful image, with its group of associated dogmas concerning the inherited curse, and the damnation of unbaptized infants, of heathens, and of heretics, has passed away from ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... their elbow to tell them what is right and they may just do as wrong as before or worse, and their best intentions merely make the road smooth for them,—you know where, children. For it is not the place itself that is paved with them as people say so often. You can't pave the bottomless pit, but you ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... it is suitable to the beginning. The beginning had all the evil of sin in it, and the end hath all the evil of punishment in it. These streams of this life's misery, they run into an infinite, boundless, and bottomless ocean of eternal wrath. If thou live according to the flesh, thou shalt die, it is not only death here, but eternal death after this. The miseries then of this present life are not a proportionable punishment of sin, they are but an earnest given of that great sum which is to be paid in ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... are not indifferent to be used and practised by us; and whosoever swalloweth this scandal of Christ's little ones, and repenteth not, the heavy millstone of God's dreadful wrath shall be hanged about his neck, to sink him down in the bottomless lake; and then shall he feel that which before ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... telling her that her low-born lover was false. He thought to flatter her by predicting that she would soon marry a very great prince or nobleman, the indications being in favor of the former, and, in place of this making her happy, she wished the wretched soothsayer in the bottomless pit—he and all his prophecies; herself, too, for going to him. His guesses were pretty shrewd; that is, admitting he did not know who Mary was, which she at least supposed was the case. So Mary wept that night and moaned ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... felt quite so sick as I've done most of this last day and night. Just before I woke it seemed to me I saw them in my dreams tens and twenties of her victims; men she's charmed and led on and on, and demoralized, ruined, killed and buried, and helped down-hill the way of the bottomless pit. I am better now; but I'm shaken. How thankful I'll be if only I get out of her, and can only stop ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... subsistence abundant, and the roads all macadamised highways; thus the conditions are altogether different from those existing with us...I can but leave to conjecture how the Germans would have got along on bottomless roads—often none at all—through the swamps and quicksands of Northern Virginia."—Memoirs. volume 2 ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... is thy Lord, O Israel! There is no being who can say to Him, 'Do this!' there is no womb which could have given birth to Him. He created the bottomless deeps above which He moves when He wishes. He brings light out of darkness, and from the dust of the earth He creates living ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... been feasting there last week because Henri Deslois was married. I heard him say a few words more which I didn't understand. Then the daylight in the kitchen turned into black night, and I felt the tiles give way under my feet and drag me down into a bottomless hole. I remember Sister Desiree-des-Anges coming to help me, but an animal had fastened itself on my chest. It made a dreadful sound which it hurt me to hear. It was like a horrible sob which always stopped ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... foaming billows. The transparently blue blocks of ice inhospitably float on the shaking cold water and press against the dark rock of the island. Their knocking resounds mournfully in the dead stillness of the barren sea. They have been floating a long time on the bottomless depths, and the waves splashing about them have quietly borne them toward the lonely rock in the midst of the sea. The sound is grewsome as they break against the shore and against one another, sadly ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... first sight, and yet they are as strange and incomprehensible a race as any in the world. They are as superstitious, as credulous of marvels, fairies, magicians, and omens, as the men whom St. Patrick preached to, and at the same time they are shrewd, skeptical, sensible, and bottomless liars. Upon the whole, I met with no nation on my travels whose company I enjoyed so much, or who inspired me with so ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... the hotel. Thither he went, because he feared to be alone; and there, among happy faces, walked to and fro, and heard the tunes go up and down, and saw Berger beat the measure, and all the while he heard the flames crackle, and saw the red fire burning in the bottomless pit. Of a sudden the band played Hiki-ao-ao; that was a song that he had sung with Kokua, and at the strain ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said in a low voice. "I can touch the bottom—or a ledge, at all events; I will feel my way, and take care not to slip down into a bottomless pit." ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... chest, as if in sleep. At irregular intervals small, involuntary contractions of pain twitched at his mouth. At times, too, he muttered noiselessly. Extraordinary. Ludowika and Felix Winscombe and himself, Howat Penny. A world peopled only by them; the silence of the room dropped into infinite space, bottomless time. A sudden dread of such vast emptiness seized Howat; he felt that he must say something, recreate about them the illusion of safe and familiar spaces and walls. It seemed that he was unable to speak; a leaden inhibition lay on his power of utterance. He made a harsh sound ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... July and August terminal panicles of creamy white flowers having large, indented glaucous foliage. It has one fault, however; it spreads rapidly and soon takes possession of the whole bed, and therefore should be in an individual hole of its own. The plantings are sometimes made in large bottomless tubs, sunk in ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... and do wonder what evil spirits have possessed you, to set forth so infamous devices void of any show of truth. I am sorry that you have so wilfully fallen from your best stay, and will needs throw yourself into the hurlpool of bottomless discredit. Was the haste so great to hie to such opprobry as that you would pronounce a never thought of action afore you had but asked the question of her that best could tell it? I see well we two be of very different natures, for I vow to God I would not corrupt ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... themselves of possessing; and he has laid open darker recesses in the bosom than were previously supposed to exist. The deep and dreadful caverns of remorse had long been explored but he was the first to visit the bottomless pit ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... but Harboro's crowning torture came when he saw the expression in her eyes. The horror of one who tumbles into a bottomless abyss was in them. But now—thank God!—she drew herself to him passionately and wept in his arms. The day had brought back to her the capacity to think, to compare the fine edifice she and Harboro had built with the wreck which a cruel beast had wrought. ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... smallest exertion. By old Surface's plate stood a gold-topped bottle, containing, not the ruddy burgundy which had become customary of late, but sparkling champagne. Surface referred to it, gracefully, as his medicine; doctors, he said, were apparently under the delusion that schoolmasters had bottomless purses. To this pleasantry Queed made no reply. He was, indeed, spare with his remarks that evening, and his want of ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... loudly, he spent freely, he paid his way, he expressed the soundest business maxims, and was as shrewd in detail as he was wise in generalities, and these things made a natural reputation for him: whilst he traded for years at the expense of his capital, and went steadily and surely towards the bottomless gulf of insolvency. Now he was on the very verge of it, and to-morrow he would be in it. It lent a feeble sting to his sufferings to know how surprised people would be, and how completely men ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... at the door of the magician's shop, he was busy with some scraps of leather. Around him were bottomless chairs, topless tables, and melancholy sofas with sagging springs exposed to view, and in one corner a tall, empty clock-case. With his spectacles on the tip of his nose and a pair of large shears in his hand, Morgan might have sat for the picture of some ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... soggy from previous rains, and it soon became a vast sea of mud. I have already spoken of Virginia mud. It beggars description. Your feet sink into it frequently ankle deep, and you lift them out with a sough. In some places it seemed as bottomless as a pit of quicksand. The old-established roads were measurably passable, but, as I have heretofore explained, most of the troops had to march directly across the fields, and here it proved absolutely impossible to move the wagon-trains and artillery any distance. This was the main reason ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... all his might. At first he heard nothing except the faint whistle of the wind somewhere in the roof. Then he heard three or four metallic noises, as if from the depths of a bottomless hit, faint and minute; and then, quite distinctly, three ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... the horse will fall, and the hair will twist, and twine, and wreathe itself like a mist of threads about him, and blind him to everything but her. Then the body will rise up within it, face to face with him, animated by a fiend, who, twining her arms around him, will drag him down to the bottomless pit." ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... quintette, in grim harmony of enterprise, go down, down, down, like so many human buckets, into a bottomless well. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... last suggestion was evident, and the result was an expedition was formed at once for Downey's Dump, a little town five miles away, where the railroad crossed a long bog on the Skagbog River. Here Downey, the contractor, had carried the railroad dump across a supposed bottomless morass and by good luck had soon made a bottom and in consequence a small fortune, with which he built a hotel, and was now the great man of the town for which ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... rising from his chair—"friends from the bottomless pit could not have more foully and fatally deceived that poor, thoughtless, trustful child. But all their trickery and treachery could never have succeeded had they not found a paltry tool in a senseless creature like you—you, Sir—who could stand there and go mumbling ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... guided by those bottomless sciences having only mythological ideas of power—by ideas moulded by personal ambitions, personal interests, or downright ignorance. Periodically we have had all the evils of the lack of a common ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... I got into bed, but not to sleep; and when the dull daylight of Monday came, all support had vanished, and I seemed to be sinking into a bottomless abyss. I became gradually worse week by week, and my melancholy took a fixed form. I got a notion into my head that my brain was failing, and this was my first acquaintance with that most awful malady hypochondria. I did not know then what I know now, ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... in a hollow tone. "The Queen, too, still clings to this fine word. When I saw her at work yesterday, it seemed as if I beheld her drawing water with the bottomless vessel of the Danaides. True, today, when I left her, her arms had fallen—and in this attitude she now stands before me with her tearful eyes. And besides, I can't get my nephew Dion out of my mind. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... me with God at all, but to the contrary, gives me a sort of undefined, painful unbelief. To me, somehow, there is no other side of the ocean. And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... ropes of sand and whose fancy was like a wave of the sea, tossed to and fro by every breath that blew. Long ere the sun rose the next morning the guarded, beloved child was as far from her safe home and her father's sheltering love as if alone she had started for the mouth of the bottomless pit. Two days later, while Margaret lay unconscious beneath the sage-brush, with a hovering eagle for watch, Rosa in the streets of a great city suddenly realized that she was more alone in the universe than ever she could have been in ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... several times on quite ordinary hands, largely because his capital was so small that he could not be bluffed out. The betting was fierce and furious. Steve, "on velvet," played brilliantly. But he was in fast company—too fast for his modest means. The Transient seemed to have a bottomless purse. The Stockman had cattle on a thousand hills, the Merchant habitually sold goods ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... original package to be counted, and also, if cement barrels are to be used in measuring the sand and stone, he should specify what a "barrel" is to be. When the concrete is to be mixed by hand the better practice is to measure the sand and stone in bottomless boxes of the general type shown by Fig. 10 and of known volume, and then specify that a bag of cement shall be called 1 cu. ft., 0.6 cu. ft., or such other fraction of a cubic foot as the engineer may choose. The ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... to-morrow we shall go forth to meet the autumn, in Northern China. I am beginning, alas! to count the youthful summers I may still hope for; I feel more gloomy each time another fades away, and flies to rejoin the others already disappeared in the dark and bottomless abyss, where ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... pews—but they call them the stalls—while the mushroom himself went back to the cavernous depths of the body, which in a theatre they have properly christened the pit, and this morning it looked like the bottomless one. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... with a sigh. "Well—there's prayer and fasting; but there'll be considerably more fasting than prayer, I should imagine. I assure you, I do pray that he doesn't make a fool of himself and marry some woman out of the bottomless ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... I lost sight of him. After a short tour, I went to winter at Paris, and there I frequently saw him. He had forgotten, apparently, the annoyances that weighed on him when he left London, and was again the gayest of the gay; living as if his purse were bottomless, and his Gibus the wishing cap of Fortunatus. Nothing was too hot or too strong for him: rated a "fast man" in England, in France he was held a viveur enrage. I did not much admire the society he selected. I saw him alternately ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... single question more would have been a plunge into a bottomless sea, and there might be ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... the coincidence appeared to my mind almost supernatural. It really seemed as if some kind old fairy had conjured up the whole place for our benefit. And—bless the good godmother!—to crown all, there were two old tea-chests and a bottomless barrel ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... time, my progress was stopped by an abrupt descent. I set down the advancing foot with caution, being aware that I might at the next step encounter a bottomless pit. To the brink of such a one I seemed now to have arrived. I stooped, and stretched my hand forward and ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... outstretched arms to save him. It reached him, it clasped him to its warm bosom, and he felt a quick heart throbbing there, and knew again it was his brother, with the sunny curls and radiant smile, who had saved him from that bottomless pit, and mounted, holding him upon his heart, to purer and ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... eyes. Looking up into them, you saw them clearly; the rest of the person they belonged to arrived quite a little while after her eyes were there. Such eyes—neither grey, nor brown, nor violet, but a mingling of all these colours, and deepening as you gazed up into them into bottomless lakes of love. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... fighting It in the glorious day and open air, instead of in the Bottomless Pit—bound, stifled, mad ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... orb, shining with comparative faintness among the stars, it slowly assumed the appearance of a vast mountainous desert. As we drew nearer its colors became more pronounced; the great flat regions appeared darker; the mountain peaks shone more brilliantly. The huge chasms seemed bottomless and blacker than midnight. Gradually separate mountains appeared. What seemed like expanses of snow and immense glaciers streaming down their sides sparkled with great brilliancy in the perpendicular rays of the sun. Our motion had now assumed the aspect of falling. We ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto you ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... wild boars that have broke into Thy vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of Thy servants. O let them not bring about their damned designs that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of Thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... hurried away like a haunted man. There was little room in his mood for sustained thought: his wits were fathoming a bottomless pit of black despair. He felt like a man born blind, through skilful surgery given the boon of sight for a day or two, and suddenly and without any warning ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... say, "Don't be frightened"; but when a wagon with four wheels travels for a considerable distance upon only two, while those on the upper side are spinning round in the air, and the whole affair inclines at a right angle toward a bottomless gulf of mud, it is rather difficult for a nervous person to heed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... suspicious, and agreed with me that we ought to seize the two men and search, incontinently, their accursed workshop. But before proceeding to do so, we wanted to see what was going to happen. After about fifteen minutes the door opened, and Cosmo Ruggiero, my mother's counsellor,—the bottomless pit which holds the secrets of the court, he from whom all women ask help against their husbands and lovers, and all the men ask help against their unfaithful wives and mistresses, he who traffics on the future as on the past, receiving pay with both hands, who sells horoscopes and is supposed ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Milky Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a bit. There is no getting out of it, and it tells no tales. Once a man is thrown into that, he sinks out of sight in a few minutes, and that is the last of him. It is our graveyard. There are about fifty in there now. The place is bottomless." ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... his back in an attitude of expectancy and determination to await his leisure. He was cramming the money into his trousers pocket as he turned round and beheld me. He was embarrassed. He, the universal debtor, the bottomless pit of loans and obligations, to ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... their doings. He was eager to come down to the Netherlands with a view to breaking the Treaty of Noyon and removing his grandson's advisers, but of course he must have money from England to pay his expenses. The money accordingly came from the apparently bottomless English purse;[232] and in January, 1517, the Emperor marched down to the Netherlands, breathing, in his despatches to Henry, threatenings and slaughter against Charles's misleaders. His descent on Flanders ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... his mind constantly turning upon women; and if his thoughts of them are often cruelly false, it is not Hamlet but his mother who is to blame: her conduct has hurled him from the peak of optimism into the bottomless pool of pessimistic doubt, above the foul waters of which he keeps struggling to ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... it is vain to seek to discover the precise spot, as these wily Scots conceal from us with care every thing respecting the geography of their country, as it is called by learned men; but we may here mention the Bloody Sykes, Bottomless Myre, and other places, as portentous names, to which their traditions attach some signification of war and slaughter. If it suits your wish, however, we can, on our way to the church, try to find this place called Bloody Sykes, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... delicious salad. 'It would appear,' I thought aloud, 'that if these pewter dishes, Green hearts of lettuce, tarragon, slips of thyme, Slices of hard boiled egg, and grains of salt. With drops of water, vinegar and oil, Had in a bottomless gulf been flying about From all eternity, one sure certain day The sweet invisible hand of Happy Chance Would serve them as a salad.' 'Likely enough,' My wife replied, 'but not so good as mine, Nor so well ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... New Haven began to cave in. Doctors of Divinity, orthodox, heterodox, with only a doxy of doubt, 'no settled opinion,' had great alacrity in sinking, and went down quick, as live as ever, into the pit of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, the bottomless pit of lower law,—one with his mother, cloaked by a surplice, hid beneath his sinister arm, and an acknowledged brother grasped by his remaining limb. Fossils of theology, dead as Ezekiel's bones, took to their feet again, and stood up for most arrant wrong. 'There is no higher ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... the king's larder will be empty; cakes must be given to him while the children of the house may lick the grindstone for a meal; his stomach is a bottomless pit; he eats so immoderately that he dies from wind. He will beg with a lakh of rupees in his pocket, and a silver begging-bowl in his hand. In his greed for funeral fees he spies out corpses like a vulture, and rejoices in the misfortunes of his clients. A village with ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Lake, the Elysian Fields, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, and the Lake Avernus. This entrance to the infernal regions was frozen over the day I saw it; so that the profane prophecy of skating on the bottomless pit might have been realized. The islands of Procida and Ischia continue and complete this side of the bay, which is about twenty miles long as the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... which, lunching on Ruskin's glacier, leaves its chicken bones and eggshells to offend all subsequent picnickers. At Woodbridge people did not make public messes of themselves. If they picnicked on a glacier they did up their eggshells in a neat package, which, in default of a handy bottomless pit, they took home with them and put in their garbage pails. That's the way nice people behaved, and what on earth was there to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... preparation used in all hospitals to relieve the severe burning in the throat caused by gas. Of all the unpleasant experiences that I had at war, this throat swabbing was the worst. It seemed to me like the surgeon who performed this act had found in my throat a bottomless pit, and as the swab went up and down my burning esophagus, I suffered great agony. Although I knew this treatment was necessary, if I was to recover speedily from the gas burns, I could ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... compensation; there's all the trouble, and vexation, and loss of time, besides losing a good horse that's like an old friend—it's nonsense talking of compensation! If there's one devil that I should like to see in the bottomless pit more than another, it's the ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... the old Scotchman, "we gae doon an' doon till we come on what we ma ca' the primary rock, and under that there is nothin'—except," with a touch of religious enthusiasm, "maybe 'tis the bottomless pit, where auld Hornie dwells, as we are tauld in the Screepture; noo let us gae up again, an' I'll show ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... murderous assault on the market people felt to me like Gehenna, without the fire and brimstone; but the heat was oppressive, and the firearms pouring their iron bullets on the fugitives, was not an inapt representative of burning in the bottomless pit. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... distance confused him; the road had telescoped absurdly; the hayfields were so small. At the turn lay the pond with yellow duckweed and a bent iron railing that divided it to keep the cows from crossing. Formerly, of course, that railing had been put to prevent children drowning in its bottomless depths; all ponds had been bottomless then, and the weeds had spread to entice the children to a watery death. But now he could have jumped across it, weed and railing too, without a run, and he looked in vain for the shores ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Lavretsky still stood, crushing the fatal note in his hands, and gazing senselessly at the floor; across a kind of tempest of darkness pale shapes hovered about him; his heart was numb with anguish; he seemed to be falling, falling—and a bottomless abyss was opening at his feet. A familiar light rustle of a silk dress roused him from his numbness; Varvara Pavlovna in her hat and shawl was returning in haste from her walk. Lavretsky trembled all over and rushed away; he felt that ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... in twenty-four hours the color returned to Dixon's face. His eyes flashed, his teeth were set, as he sprang to his feet. In that instant he set his face against the power that would fling him into bottomless abysses of shame ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... foraging expedition. We stumbled down the hill and away along the railroad. A faint rumbling that grew to a confused roar fell on our ears. We climbed a bank into a wild conglomeration of wood and tin architecture, nationalities, colors, and noises, and across a dark, bottomless gully from the high street we had reached lights flashed amid a very ocean of uproar. "The Rowdy," as if to make the campaign as real as possible, led us racing down into the black abyss, whence we charged up the further slope ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... she swallowed silently, looking out on the rain. The picture of herself and David, alone in a log cabin somewhere on the other side of the world, caused a sudden return of yesterday's dejection. It rushed back upon her in a flood under which her heart declined into bottomless depths. She felt as if actually sinking into some dark abyss of loneliness and that she must clutch at her father and Daddy John to stay ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... power, Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal power, Who durst ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... abundant water, care of halls and sidewalks. The elevator-boy takes the place of "buttons," the engineer and janitor relieve the man of the house of care, so that it may not be so extravagant as it sounds to give one third the $3000 income for rent, since it stops that leaky sieve, that bottomless bag of "operating expenses." The income may be pretty definitely estimated in this case, especially if meals are taken in the cafe. If the family dine as it happens, the cost mounts up. Here are a few estimates for ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... crisis. He was a priest and he no longer believed. This had suddenly dawned before him like a bottomless abyss. It was the end of his life, the collapse of everything. What should he do? Did not simple rectitude require that he should throw off the cassock and return to the world? But he had seen some renegade priests and had despised them. A married priest ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... war a trade; they laid under tribute and enslaved the adjacent nations, but were not profusion, extravagance, dissipation, the necessary consequences of conquest? was not Roman idleness the inevitable result of the filling of Italy with slaves? Every hour rendered wider that bottomless gulf which separates immense riches from abject poverty. Did not the middle class, in which reside the virtue and strength of a nation, disappear, and aristocratic families remain in Rome, whose estates in Syria ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... be all right in two seconds," answered Larry, from some bottomless abyss. "Tare an' ages; what'll I do at all," I heard him continuing, as he made his way into the hall. Oh what a clatter he made upon the pavement,—for it was all stone! And how the drops of perspiration stood upon my brow as I ...
— The O'Conors of Castle Conor from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope
... haze obscured the lost depths, hiding details, giving a bottomless distance out of which, like the breath of wind, floated up a faint treble, vibrating upon the senses, yet never ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... surprise, in moonlight meditation fancy free, and all his little private family matters found in his innocent bosom, quite promiscuous; but his beans marked. That don't dovetail nohow. Gents, did ever you hear of the man that went to the bottom of the bottomless pit to ease his mind? Well, he was the head of my family. I must go to the bottom whether there's one or not. And just now I see but ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... years of warfare, passing as I did from family to family, and always concerned with questions that touch upon the innermost shrine of our life, I necessarily became the recipient of many hidden sorrows. In fact, my fellow-creatures used me as a bottomless well into which they could empty their household skeletons; and I used often to reflect with sardonic satisfaction that I should never run dry like other old wells, but that death would come and ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... oppressed? Have not our children been butchered and our gains wrung from us to fill the bottomless greed and lust of the Lagidae? Have not the temples been forsaken?—ay, have not the majesties of the Eternal Gods been set at naught by these Grecian babblers, who have dared to meddle with the immortal truths, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... access is gained to most of the halls of learning—the door of independent study—is for ever slammed in his face. Not that he will seriously try to open it; for with the ability to read the desire to read will have aborted. The distrust of the child, on which Western education is based, is a bottomless gulf in which educational effort, whatever form it may take or in whatever quarter it may originate, is for the most part swallowed up and made as though it had not been. The child who leaves school at the age of fourteen will have attended some 2,000 or 3,000 reading lessons in the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... me; it is better to fall down a precipice and die than be laughed at by such a woman; so I clenched my teeth, and in another instant I was on that horrible, narrow, bending plank, with bottomless space beneath and around me. I have always hated a great height, but never before did I realise the full horrors of which such a position is capable. Oh, the sickening sensation of that yielding board resting on the two moving supports. I grew ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... and deep that the superstitious Romans viewed it with awe and affright. Whether it was due to an earthquake or the wrath of the gods is not for us to say. The Romans believed the latter; those who prefer may believe the former. But, so we are told, it seemed bottomless. Throw what they would in it, it stood unfilled, and the feeling grew that no power of man could ever fill ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... he seemed to stop breathing. He felt the tank balance ever so slightly. Staring with aching eyes through the portholes, he saw that they were on the edge of the old quarry, with a forty-foot drop down its steep sides before them. The black depth seemed bottomless. The tank was slipping over. When she shot down they would all be killed ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... tumbling over and over through the floor into a frightful hole, descending as she ascends? Ho! only this! it alludes to my disrelish to matrimony: Which is a bottomless pit, a gulph, and I know not what. And I suppose, had I not awoke in such a plaguy fright, I had been soused into some river at the bottom of the hole, and then been carried (mundified or purified from my past iniquities,) by the same bright form (waiting for me upon the mossy banks,) ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... preached we may describe as a kind of moral Prudence: 'in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' do not sink yourselves in boundless, bottomless abysses ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... able to fight, but being reluctant to do so, menace each other by threats and sabre-rattling, edging slowly forward, each hoping that his adversary will retreat rather than do battle"; but the Emperor's comparison was not exact, for one of these swordsmen had behind him a bottomless pit, ready to engulf him at the first backward step, so that having to choose between an ignominious death and a combat in which he might be successful he had to choose the latter. This was the situation in which Alexander found himself, a situation made worse by the influence exerted ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... the almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition: there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy the ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... gloomier day, Hide a still deeper curse. Ring then, ye cymbals, enliven this dream! Ye horns, shout a fiercer, more vulture-like scream! And jump, caper, leap, prance, dance yourselves out of breath! For your life is all art; Love has given you no heart: Therefore shout till ye plunge into bottomless death. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... an education which only appeals to the one faculty of memory, and to that mainly by means of birch-rods, increase the rebellion, and the sense of restraint is brought to a climax when at last old Andreas dies. Then "the dark bottomless Abyss, that lies under our feet, had yawned open; the pale kingdoms of Death, with all their innumerable silent nations and generations, stood before him; the inexorable word NEVER! now first ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... he saw the shell, he saw the vast expanse of lighted nothingness, he tried to imagine what it was that that mass of iron rested upon. If he had not seen it, he would have thought he had come out into the upper air of some bottomless cavern. But a great iron machine nearly twenty feet long could not rest upon air! He thought he might be dreaming; he sat up and shut his eyes; in a few minutes he would open them and see if he still saw the same ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... comes up out of a dense and livid ground. It comes up out of a ground that lies thickly packed beneath our feet, and that is wider than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottomless abysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends downward through all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down to the very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of the British blockade. But it would have taken at least six months more fighting, the loss of thousands more precious and irreplaceable lives, and the squandering of vast additional wealth in the bottomless waste of war." ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... children—were employed, under the few officers who had any knowledge of engineering, in throwing up batteries and forming entrenchments round the town. In some cases the walls were strengthened by the aid of a machine, consisting of a large square bottomless box, into which the mud was thrown, and then beaten down hard. A number of these boxes were used at a time, and it was extraordinary with what rapidity a strong wall could thus be erected. The mud was brought in carts, in baskets, and in various other ways, and thrown into the box. Additional ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... we began a descent, which seemed absolutely endless. Time after time we thought we had reached the bottom, only to find that we were on a terrace from which another drop led us still further down. On and on into this bottomless pit we descended to Ziracuaretaro, a striking town. Banana plantings surrounded the houses; orange-trees covered with their golden spheres reared themselves to the unusual height of thirty feet or more; mameys, with their strange nut-brown fruits, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... for the most part, saved them from calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy: the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers saved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil compared with which all these are fleabites, the most desolating curse that can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name except we call it satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order; not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Wastin of Wastiniog we are told that he was forbidden to strike his wife with the bridle. Let us compare this prohibition with that of the fairy of "the bottomless pool of Corwrion," in Upper Arllechwedd, Carnarvonshire, who wedded the heir of the owner of Corwrion. The marriage took place on two conditions—first, that the husband was not to know his wife's name, though he might give her any name he chose; and, second, that ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... renewal in the space of seven years.—As an illustration there was the village of four hundred and fifty inhabitants in 1789 furnished (1792 and 1793) fifty soldiers. (" Histoire du Village de Croissy, Seine-et-Oise pendant la Revolution," by Campenon.).—La Vendee was a bottomless pit, like Spain and Russia afterwards. "A good republican, who entrusted with the supply the Vendee army with provisions for fifteen months, assured me that out of two hundred thousand men whom he had seen precipitated into this gulf there were not ten thousand that ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a few hundred yards, when the little procession began threading along the face of a mass of rocks, where the path was so narrow that she felt the swish of her skirts against the mountain wall, and on her right it sloped downward perpendicularly, until what seemed a bottomless pit was hidden in a pool of gloom. A misstep by any member of the party would have sent him or her to instant destruction. But the animals and men moved confidently, though the pace was slow. Evidently, with the exception of the women, all were familiar, not only with this ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... instrument. One Malone was evicted. He was a married man, without encumbrances, owed several years' arrears, had mismanaged his farm, a really good bit of land, had been forgiven a lot of rent, and still he was not happy. A relative had lent him nearly L200 to carry on, but Malone was a bottomless pit. What he required was a gold mine and a man to shovel up the ore, but unhappily no such thing existed on the farm. The relative offered to take the land, believing that he could soon recoup himself the loan, but Malone held on with ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... one mile or less, beat anything in the way of marching that human nature ever experienced. The dust that had accumulated by the armies passing over on their march to Gettysburg was now a perfect bog, while the horses and vehicles sinking in the soft earth made the road appear bottomless. We would march two or three steps, then halt for a moment or two; then a few steps more, and again the few minutes' wait. The men had to keep their hands on the backs of their file leaders to tell when to move and when to halt. The night being so dark ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... us from the power of darkness and the bottomless pit, and set us upon the throne of glory. It is salvation from death and hell, and curse and ruin. But that is only the half of it. It is salvation to God, and light, and glory, and honor, and immortality; and from earth ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... had said this, Thespesius' kinsman hurried him at great speed through immense space, as it seemed to him, though he travelled as easily and straight as if he were carried on the wings of the sun's rays. At last he got to an extensive and bottomless abyss, where his strength left him, as he found was the case with the other souls there: for keeping together and making swoops, like birds, they flitted all round the abyss, but did not venture to pass over it. To internal ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... was bent over her work. He saw how with every stitch she was fighting stubbornly for calm—fighting with all the dogged desperation of a high-minded woman who sees herself trembling at the edge of a bottomless abyss. He knew now for certain that her apparent happiness was a sham and an heroic lie—that she knew what he knew of Travers' outside life, and suffered with the intensity which honor must suffer when linked with ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... you won't chate the divil so aisy"—(here there was a sensation). "Ha! ha! that makes you open your ears, does it? More shame for you; you ought to despise that dirty enemy of man, and depend on something betther—but I see I must call you to a sense of your situation with the bottomless pit undher you, and no roof over you. Oh dear! dear! dear!—I'm ashamed of you—troth, if I had time and sthraw enough, I'd rather thatch the place myself than lose my time talking to you; sure the place is ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.... In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... with thousands of canyons that writhed over the white expanse like snakes in tortuous convulsions. From these bottomless abysses arose a luminous amethystine vapor. In the depths jutting icicles took fire and glowed through the lustrous mists like burning eyes. Where the chasms joined with others or widened, ominous shapes, swathed in wind-blown blackish-purple robes, with extended ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... she then was, did not grieve over her loss; indeed, she returned to the bosom of her family, and her father—a shrewd usurer, who had amassed an enormous fortune during the wars—succeeded, with the aid of his apparently bottomless moneybags, in having his first son-in-law declared deceased by Royal decree, so as to enable the beautiful Rachel to contract another, yet more brilliant alliance, as far as name and lineage were concerned, with the Marquis ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,—so have their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fought his way along, his veil lowered, his handkerchief at his mouth. Outside those public-houses that advertised ice, crowds stood waiting their turn of entry; while half-naked barmen, their linen trousers drenched with sweat, worked like niggers to mix drinks which should quench these bottomless thirsts. Mahony believed he was the only perfectly sober person in the lobby of the court. Even Ocock himself would seem to ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... to be propped up between tall stakes set in the ground; its bottomless bottom turned towards the earth, so that the aperture would be below. Under this a fire was to be kindled—not, however, until everything else should be ready; and the hot air rising up into the aperture would enter the balloon, and cause it to swell out to its full globular dimensions. More hot ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Brooklyn Naval Hospital, August 12, 1877, 4 A.M. Called up by the Quartermaster. With Surgeon C. W. White, U.S.N., took (A) one five inch glass beaker, bottomless, (B) three clean glass slides, (C) chloride of calcium solution, [symbol: dra(ch)m] i to [symbol: ounce] i water. We went, as near as I could judge in the darkness, to about that portion of the wall that lies west of the hospital, southeast corner (now all filled ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... labour under it for the rest of their lives. But Olenin was too strongly conscious of the presence of that all-powerful God of Youth—of that capacity to be entirely transformed into an aspiration or idea—the capacity to wish and to do—to throw oneself headlong into a bottomless abyss without knowing why or wherefore. He bore this consciousness within himself, was proud of it and, without knowing it, was happy in that consciousness. Up to that time he had loved only himself, and could not help loving himself, for he expected nothing but good of himself and had not ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... down into the bottomless pit, extending clear across the plain to the distant jungle. An enormous canyon cloven in the earth, filled with the slowly settling ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various |
