"Inextricable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'the heathen' had been raised from every lip; even the daughter and eleve of Ruth repeated it, as they fled wailing through the buildings; and, for a moment, terror and surprise appeared to involve the assailed in inextricable confusion. But the promptitude of the young men in rushing to the rescue, with the steadiness of Content, soon restored order. Even the females assumed at least the semblance of composure, the family having been too long trained to meet ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... interests of Slavery were not involved) he elected to pursue the latter; and he has pursued it with an impotence which has cost the nation already many millions of dollars, and which has involved the "army of Utah" in inextricable embarrassments, allowing them to be shut up in the snows of the mountains before they could strike a blow or reach the first object of their expedition. Not very well appointed in the beginning, this little force was despatched to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... nothing; for the simple reason that there was nothing to be done; the ship was sinking fast—so fast, indeed, that she would probably plunge head first to the bottom in less than five minutes, which—taking into consideration the state of absolute panic that prevailed, and the inextricable raffle of wreckage that cumbered and filled the decks—would leave no time in which to construct even the rudest kind of raft. No, there seemed to be nothing for it but for all hands to go down with the ship, thanks to the ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... work, sound now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle—it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, and fuller of story ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... besides the fact that the solid formation would render the execution of artillery among them much more destructive, in the event of a repulse it would be almost impossible to rally them, as the different regiments would necessarily lack space in which to manoeuvre, the lines inevitably mix up in an inextricable mass, and the whole body become a disorganized mob. Some of the rebel divisions were formed in column, either of division or company, all closed ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... and I sat in the gloom of a London November evening, in our house in Ormond Street. I was out of health, and felt as if I were in an inextricable coil of misery. Lucy and I wrote to each other, but that was little; and we dared not see each other for dread of the fearful Third, who had more than once taken her place at our meetings. My uncle had, on the day I speak of, bidden prayers to be put ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... species of satire throws into doubt; yet they still seem shadowed out from some truths; but the truths who can unravel from the fictions? And thus a narrative is consigned to posterity which involves illustrious characters in an inextricable network of calumny ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... was in Shanghai, he saw a Taoist priest conducting Confucian worship in a Buddhist temple. Even if inconsistency were proved to the Chinese, he would not be in the least disturbed for he cares nothing for such considerations. "Hence it is that the Chinese religion of to-day has become an inextricable blending of the three systems.''[17] "The ancient simplicity of the state religion has been so far corrupted as to combine in one ritual gods, ghosts, flags and cannon. It has become at once ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... money, which they did with great zeal, and continued the operation until the notes were not worth sixpence to the dollar. As might have been expected, this institution exploded after a few months, involving Smith and his brethren in inextricable difficulties. The consequence was that he and most of the members of the church set off. In the spring of 1838, for Missouri, pursued by their creditors, but to ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... regard accordingly. Nothing more. There proves, I believe, no visible real vestige of a copyright obtainable here; only Chapman asserts that he has obtained one, and that he will take all contraveners into Chancery,—which has a terrible sound; and indeed the Act he founds on is of so distracted, inextricable a character, it may mean anything and all things, and no Sergeant Talfourd whom we could consult durst take upon him to say that it meant almost anything whatever. The sound of "Chancery," the stereotype character of this volume, and its ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... striking brevity the contrast between the visible and the invisible presences that may stand about a man's last hour; for he may feel with the desolate Oedipus that "all I am has perished"—he may sink like Dion through inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, and then in a moment the transitory shall disappear and the essential shall be made plain, and from Dioa's upright spirit the perplexities shall vanish away, and Oedipus, in the welcome of that unknown companionship, shall ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... or folio. The confident assertions, the cautious ventures, the length of time demanded to ascertain the fact, the precise terms of the forfeit, the provisoes for getting out of paying it at last, led to a long and inextricable discussion. Kirkpatrick's vanity, however, one night led him into a terrible pitfall. He recklessly ventured money on the fact that The Mourning Bride was written by Shakespeare; headlong he fell, and ruefully ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... dreadless, is he not The monarch of the world? What then art thou? No refuge! no appeal! Sink with me then, 70 We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin, Even as a vulture and a snake outspent Drop, twisted in inextricable fight, Into a shoreless sea. Let hell unlock Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire, 75 And whelm on them into the bottomless void This desolated world, and thee, and me, The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck Of that for which ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... for bringing forth the young. It is therefore a genuine nest, not only by the manner in which it is made, but by the object it is intended to serve. The mouse chooses in the midst of its usual domain a tuft with leaves more or less crossed; but not too inextricable, so that there may remain in the midst an empty space, in the centre of which the work will be arranged. Great ingenuity is shown in the preliminaries; the mouse simplifies its task by utilising material within its reach instead of going ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... of all fair flowers, which lovest thou best? The Rose? She is a queen more wonderful Than any who have bloomed on Orient thrones: Sabaean Empress! in her breast, though small, Beauty and infinite sweetness sweetly dwell, Inextricable. Or dost dare prefer The Woodbine, for her fragrant summer breath? Or Primrose, who doth haunt the hours of Spring, A wood-nymph brightening places lone and green? Or Cowslip? or the virgin Violet, That nun, who, nestling in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... Africa and New Zealand. The British Isles are but little larger than the New Zealand group, and much more compact and homogeneous. Their close economic intercourse, the presence of two races with a history of strife behind them, but compelled by their inextricable geographical blending to confront the necessity of union, are reproduced in the conditions of South Africa. In so far then as the Colonial analogy bears upon the question at all, it cannot be said to be in favour of Federal Home Rule ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... next to Drake's well, that made the oil available, was the discovery, which was made by Samuel Van Syckel, that a two-inch pipe, starting at the well, could convey the oil for several miles to the nearest railway station. In a few years the whole oil region of Venango County was an inextricable tangle of these primitive pipelines. Thus, before the Civil war had ended, the western Pennsylvania wilderness had been transformed into the busy headquarters of a new industry. Companies had been formed, many of them the wildest stock-jobbing operations, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... delightfull to his soule Then myrrh or incense to the offended Heauens. In person, therefore, will be come himselfe To see the marriage rites solemnized And in the presence of the court of Spaine To knit a sure [inextricable] band Of kingly loue and euerlasting league Betwixt the crownes of Spaine and Portingale. There will he giue his crowne to Balthazar, And ...
— The Spanish Tragedie • Thomas Kyd
... into detail in my account of this experiment, for the reason that it illustrates very aptly the inextricable tangle of truth and error which most 'spirit communications' present. It typifies in little the elusive problem of spirit identification which many a veteran investigator is still at work upon, after years of study. Maxwell gives a case of long-continued ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted more than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the contradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the more authentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the night (eleven to twelve o'clock) the army is simply a mob. There appears to be neither organization nor discipline. The various commands are mixed up in what seems to be inextricable confusion. Were a division of the enemy to pounce down upon us between this and morning, I fear the Army of the Cumberland would be ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... direct assault, full compensation existed in other tactical advantages to the army taking the offensive. It is not probable that Lee, in Hooker's place, would have selected such ground. "Once in the wood, it was difficult to tell any thing at one hundred yards. Troops could not march without inextricable confusion." Despite which fact, however, the density of these very woods was the main cause of ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... the noise of thunder—blocks rattling against the deck, as if they wanted to knock their brains out—ropes dancing about in galvanised coils, like mad serpents—and everything to an inexperienced eye in inextricable confusion; till gradually she pays off on the other tack—the sails stiffen into deal-boards—the staysail sheet is let go—and heeling over on the opposite side. Again she darts forward over the sea like an arrow from the bow. "Stand by to make sail!" "Out all reefs!" I could have carried ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... indeed, and the boy began to believe that he had gotten himself into an inextricable difficulty, for how to reach the steam man and renew the fire, under the circumstances, was a question which might well puzzle an ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... trial, that he who 'had received the promises' was called to do what seemed to blast all hope of their being fulfilled. What a cruel position to have God's command and God's promise apparently in diametrical opposition! But faith loosened even that seemingly inextricable tangle of contradiction, and felt that to obey was for man, and to keep His promise was for God. If we do our duty, He will see to the consequences. 'Tis mine to obey; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Sankwei took his first step backward the sun of his fortunes began to set. Calamity rapidly followed calamity. Wou Sankwei had not known the meaning of defeat in his long career of fifty years, but now, in his old age, he saw his affairs in inextricable confusion. His adherents deserted him, many rebel officers sought to come to terms with the Manchus, and Kanghi's armies gradually converged on Wou Sankwei from the east and the north. Driven out of ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... and little towns along the white high-road to Metz, the tall poplars that lined it being torn down by the round shot, thus blocking the way. The broken vehicles and baggage wagons that were mingled together in an inextricable mass also added to the obstruction; Malmaison, Vionville, and Rezonville were filled with war victims; and all the surgeons, French as well as German, that could be summoned to help, were as busy as they could possibly be. Carriages and stretchers covered ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pines that they had expected to see in the bottom was no more. For miles the valley before them was a blackened waste. Like giant jackstraws the huge pine sticks, that they had last seen as magnificent, towering trees, were heaped in inextricable confusion or still stood, broken, blasted, gaunt, limbless, spectral, awful remnants of their former selves. No words could convey the terrible desolation of the scene. Where formerly these giant pines had risen heavenward, higher and more stately than the most exquisite church ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... heads. The top of the opening is low, of complicated curves and fine mouldings, on the outermost of which are cut small curly leaves, but higher up the branches of the jambs with their thistle heads and ribbons with knotted ropes and leaves form a mass of inextricable intricacy, of which little can be seen in the dark except ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... afforded him a momentary diversion from the cares of his exalted office. A longer experience than his of diplomatic correspondence would fail to produce from the pigeon-holes of all the Chanceries a rival to this extraordinary composition, the ill-arranged paragraphs of which formed an inextricable jumble of irrelevant material, in which bad logic, bad history, and barren invective were confusedly intermingled in a torrent of turgid rhetoric. The extent of its range may be judged from the fact that Shakespeare's allusions to Joan of Arc were not deemed too remote from ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... lines were pierced through about fifty yards behind the baggage camels. Luckily for us the very impetuosity of the Black Kendah rush deprived it of most of the fruits of victory, since the two squadrons, being unable to check their horses, ended by charging into each other and becoming mixed in inextricable confusion. Then, I do not know who gave the order, we wheeled our camels in and fell upon them, a struggling, stationary mass, with the result that many of them were speared, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... struggle with personal resentment bred by remembrance of scant courtesy and ingratitude meted out to him. He learned that Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking's embarrassments did, in point of fact, skirt the edge of ruin. Their affairs were in apparently inextricable confusion, owing to Reginald Barking's reckless speculations, while, to add to the general confusion, that strenuous young man had broken down utterly from nervous verstrain, and was, at the present time, incapable of the slightest mental ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... other objections of the same kind may be urged against the opinions mentioned. Nor are the views that are entertained of the offices and pulse of the heart, perhaps, less bound up with great and most inextricable difficulties. The heart, it is vulgarly said, is the fountain and workshop of the vital spirits, the centre from which life is dispensed to the several parts of the body. Yet it is denied that the right ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... on shore produced in my brain was such that every effort I made to remember anything about it only increased my difficulty, and I felt myself in a web so tangled and inextricable that all endeavor to escape free was impossible. Sometimes I thought that I had really married Matilda Dalrymple; then, I supposed that the father had called me out, and wounded me in a duel; and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the discovery has been made before it was too late. Had I listened to his deceits, and, as the perfidious man had almost persuaded me, precipitated myself into an inextricable ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... seized a hooded waterproof cloak, and slipped out of the house unperceived. The rain was falling steadily along the descending trail where she walked, but beyond, scarcely a mile across the chasm, the wintry distance began to confuse her brain with the inextricable swarming of snow. Hurrying down with feverish excitement, she at last came in sight of the arching granite portals of their domain. But her first glance through the gateway showed it closed as if with a white portcullis. Kate remembered ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... double, The mind in pain, and the hands in trouble. The life men live is a weary coil, There is no rest from woe and toil; And if there's aught elsewhere more dear Than drawing breath as we do here, That darkness holds In black inextricable folds. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... settlers came to New England from the old country, they brought with them a few tunes to which they sang all the psalms and hymns. The proper mode of rendering these was through the nose. With the lapse of time and the advent of a new generation, these tunes became jangled together in inextricable confusion. The practice was for a deacon as leader to read a line of the psalm or hymn, and the congregation sang at it as best they could, each one using such tune as he chose, and often sliding from one tune to another in the same line or improvising ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... risk Hope's peace forever; he was to make her sweet sisterly affection its own executioner. In obedience to her love he must revive Emilia's. The tender intercourse which he had been trying to renounce as a crime must be rebaptized as a duty. Was ever a man placed, he thought, in a position so inextricable, so disastrous? What could he offer Emilia? How could he explain to her his position? He could not even tell her that it was at Hope's ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the events of this war should progress as they are foreshadowed in the proclamation of September 22, then the application of this proclamation may create inextricable complications. Not only in one and the same State, but in one and the same district, nay, even in the same township, after January 1st, 1863, may be found Africo-Americans, portions of whom are emancipated, the others in bondage. But the stern logic of events will save the illogical, pusillanimous, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... personate both knight and lady, and present these false doubles to each. Each sees what seems to be the other's fall from virtue, and, horrified by the sight, the real persons leave the hermitage by separate ways, and wander, in inextricable mazes lost, until fortune and faery bring them together again and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Hubbell replied. "I am willing to acknowledge it freely. In his explanation of the parable of the Prodigal Son, he gave me the clew to our modern times. What was for me an inextricable puzzle has become clear as day. He has made me understand, at last, the force which stirred me, which goaded me until I was fairly compelled to embark in the movement which the majority of our citizens still continue to regard as quixotic. I did not ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sweeping subversion of the control of the Company's servants over the collections of the revenue, and the vesting of it in a black dewan, but fraud and peculation? What else, I say, was to be expected, in the inextricable turnings and windings of that black mystery of iniquity, but the concealment of every species of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... Inextricable confusion reigns in the classification, affinities, and naming of Runts. Several characters which are generally pretty constant in other pigeons, such as the length of the wings, tail, legs, and neck, and the amount of naked skin ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... measuring the power of our cause, and of comprehending its vitality. This is to be found in its accordance with the best elements of human nature. It is beyond the power of slavery to annihilate affinities recognized and established by the Almighty. The slave is bound to mankind by the powerful and inextricable net-work of human brotherhood. His voice is the voice of a man, and his cry is the cry of a man in distress, and man must cease to be man before he can become insensible to that cry. It is the righteous of the cause—the humanity of the cause—which ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... attached to this ridiculous method, that I lost a prodigious deal of time and had bewildered my head to such a degree, that I was hardly capable of doing, seeing or comprehending anything. I fortunately perceived, at length, that I was in the wrong road, which would entangle me in an inextricable labyrinth, and quitted it before I ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of sailors standing under the lee of the wall, chafing at their apparent helplessness and gazing anxiously out to sea, were suddenly electrified into action by a few sharp orders from the oilskinned commander. A minute or two of seemingly inextricable confusion resulted in the beams of a portable searchlight flashing out from the spray-swept breakwater and lighting up rocks, foam, and a big three-masted Norwegian sailing ship, with sails torn, her fore-mast broken ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... at first intended to arrange the chapters according to "schools," but it soon became evident that such a plan would lead to inextricable confusion, and it was found best to follow the chronological order ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... seized in the night, save that they were louder and harsher. Over and over they floundered and rolled. The mud and water flew about. Long legs, shaggy paws, wet, wriggling tail, and squawking beak, fur and feathers—all turning and squirming in inextricable confusion. It was hard telling which was having the best of the melee, when, on a sudden, the struggle stopped, as ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... things that he has written appear pagan enough, and have been regarded as such. The God of Christians seems to inhabit and preside over an amazing Valhalla of pagan divinities; and indeed throughout Mr. Kipling's work the heavens and the earth are mingled in a most inextricable and astonishing fashion. It is said that not long ago, during the launch of a Chinese battleship at one of our British yards, they were burning papers to the gods in a small joss-house upon the pier, while the great vessel, fitted with all the most modern machinery, was leaving the stocks. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... spirit was there. The Emperor himself endeavored to repair the disaster; he rode with lightening speed hither and thither, commanding, ordering, nay imploring too; but already the night was falling, the confusion became each moment more inextricable, and the effort was a fruitless one. A regiment of the Guards, and two batteries were in reserve behind Planchenoit; he threw them rapidly into position; but the overwhelming impulse of flight drove the mass upon them, and they were carried away upon the torrent ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... we found ourselves at the top of the cliff and confronted by a dense undergrowth of jungle, consisting for the most part of an inextricable tangle of tough creepers, interspersed with shrubs and trees of various kinds, many of which seemed to be fruit bearers. Among these we recognised the plantain, banana, custard-apple, loquat, granadilla, guava, pawpaw, and some others with which none of us were acquainted; the fruit, however, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... do." "Nothing," quoth I. "Can God do evil?" "No," quoth I, "Wherefore," quoth she, "evil is nothing, since He cannot do it who can do anything." "Dost thou mock me," quoth I, "making with thy reasons an inextricable labyrinth, because thou dost now go in where thou meanest to go out again, and after go out, where thou camest in, or dost thou frame a wonderful circle of the simplicity of God? For a little before taking thy beginning from blessedness, thou ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... article of faith. It was first made so among the Protestants to provide something incontestable in place of the councils and the Pope. But this only drove Protestants from Scylla into Charybdis, and landed them in inextricable difficulties, because they withdrew the Gospels from the historical soil out of which they sprang. But we do not escape Charybdis by steering again into Scylla, but by endeavouring to rise above Charybdis, ay, even above the Gospels. In our human shortsightedness ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... dressed as a nun, who, more astonished even than myself, does not utter one word or make a movement. I throw myself in an arm-chair in order to breathe and to recover from my surprise. The sight of C—— C—— had annihilated me, and my mind was as much stupefied as my body. I found myself in an inextricable maze. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... unwarrantable hypothesis forms an essential part, carries its condemnation within itself; but, even supposing such a definition were, in form, tenable, the physiologist who should attempt to apply it in Nature would soon find himself involved in great, if not inextricable, difficulties. As we have said, it is indubitable that offspring TEND to resemble the parental organism, but it is equally true that the similarity attained never amounts to identity, either in form or in structure. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of this; and yet to her there seemed also a sort of injustice involved in it. She felt stung often, and wounded, in spite of all reasoning with herself that she had no cause to do so, that Stephen was but doing right. So inevitable and inextricable are pains and dilemmas when once we enter ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the 19th and, after a very heavy march in the dark, we reached our new quarters about ten o'clock. The groves were separated by a narrow lane, and here the entire transport of the Brigade had contrived to get itself into the most inextricable confusion. There was no room for two limbers to pass abreast, and they could be turned only by separating the two halves and turning ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... person, to an extent which would justify any philanthropic stranger in clapping me into a strait-waistcoat without further inquiry, endeavoring to goad H. into some dim and faint understanding of a prompter's duties, and struggling in such a vortex of noise, dirt, bustle, confusion, and inextricable entanglement of speech and action as you would grow giddy in contemplating. We perform A Roland for an Oliver, A good Night's Rest, and Deaf as a Post. This kind of voluntary hard labor used to be my great delight. The furor has come strong upon me again, and I begin to be ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... seconds after the two companions disappeared in a copse. It was a dense thicket made of huge cypresses, sycamores, tulip-trees, olives, tamarinds, oaks, and magnolias. The different trees intermingled their branches in inextricable confusion, and quite hid the view. Michel Ardan and Maston walked on side by side phasing silently through the tall grass, making a road for themselves through the vigorous creepers, looking in all the bushes or ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... results were only obtained at enormous expense and by means of pecuniary sacrifices, loans, imposts, obligations of every sort, which left the king in inextricable embarrassment, and France in a condition of exhaustion still further aggravated by the deplorable administration of the public finances. On the 15th of April, 1596, Henry IV. wrote from Amiens to Rosny, "My friend, you know as well as any of my servants what troubles, labors, and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... ideas about the gods, and expressed them in language which we should call figurative. The figures remained, when their meaning was lost; the names were then supposed to be gods, the nomina became numina, and out of the inextricable confusion of thought which followed, the belief in cannibal, bestial, adulterous, and incestuous gods was evolved. That is Mr. Muller's hypothesis; with him the evolution, a result of a disease of language, has ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... mattresses seemed so soft or the sheets so comfortable as they did to the tired boys. Their heads had hardly touched the pillows before they were off in dreamland—a region in which, on that night at least, fires, panthers and sharks raged in inextricable confusion. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... drawn close to it, with their brocade panels stained and well-worn showing at the back, the dark ceiling, the piece of tapestry that hung over the side-table between the doors—it was a martial scene, faded and discoloured, with ghostly bare-legged knights on fat prancing horses all in inextricable conflict, a great battleaxe stood out against the dusky foliage of an autumn tree; and a stag with his fore feet in the air, ramped in the foreground, looking over his shoulder. It was a ludicrously bad piece ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... acknowledgments in other parts of the discussion. I have no wish to disparage my opponent; I had rather do the contrary; but he did not properly and adequately understand the great question which he undertook to discuss. Hence he got involved in inextricable difficulties, and, in spite of all he could do, his attempted defence of the Bible was, to a great ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... difficulties, against which reason seems stricken into palsy, leave him bewildered in dismay—when darkness, which experience cannot pierce, wraps the conscience, as sudden night wraps the traveller in the desert—when error entangles his feet in its inextricable web—when, still desirous of the right, he sees before him but a choice of evil; and the Angel of the Past, with a flaming sword, closes on him the gates of the Future. Then, Faith flashes on him, with a light from the cloud. Then, he clings ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his young men to attend him, but never mentions him more; he makes Protheus, after an interview with Silvia, say he has only seen her picture; and, if we may credit the old copies, he has, by mistaking places, left his scenery inextricable. The reason of all this confusion seems to be, that he took his story from a novel, which he sometimes followed, and sometimes forsook, ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... all this is, that except now and then by chance, the form of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvelous and quaint confusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction of growth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable, part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it out in facsimile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and you must therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more or less imitate, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... apart from the nature of the investigation which my friend had on hand, there was something in his masterly grasp of a situation, and his keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a pleasure to me to study his system of work, and to follow the quick, subtle methods by which he disentangled the most inextricable mysteries. So accustomed was I to his invariable success that the very possibility of his failing had ceased ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... confusion and dismay attending Jackson's fall. It would be difficult, indeed, to form an exaggerated estimate of the condition of Jackson's corps at this time. The troops had been thrown into what seemed inextricable disorder, in consequence of the darkness and the headlong advance of the Second (Calston's) Division upon the heels of Rhodes, which had resulted in a complete intermingling of the two commands; and, to make matters worse, General A.P. Hill, the second in command, had been wounded and ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... in distress like the vessel, but after another fashion, had, in the inextricable intersection of shadows which rose up before him, no resource but the footsteps in the snow, and he held to it as the thread ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the point of coming to an understanding with him, in order to put an end to the system, when an unfortunate accident saved me that trouble, by involving us in inextricable ruin. ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... confusion. The new line under Colonel Wilkins also gave way soon after and it was now impossible to exercise any further control. The road became crowded and jammed with troops; the wagons and artillery sinking into the deep mud became inextricable and added to the general confusion which now prevailed. No power could now check or control the panic-stricken mass as it swept toward the rear, led off by Colonel Winslow at the head of his brigade of cavalry, and who ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... which met the eye, there were sounds of revelry which fell almost appallingly upon the ear. The wide expanse reverberated with bacchanal songs, and drunken shouts, and frenzied war-whoops. These were all blended in an inextricable clamor. With the unrefined eminently, and in a considerable degree with the most refined, noise is one of the essential elements of festivity. A thousand men were making all the noise they could in this midnight revel. Probably never before, since the dawn ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... states. The effects, indeed, of these restraints upon marriage are but too conspicuous in the consequent vices that are produced in almost every part of the world, vices that are continually involving both sexes in inextricable unhappiness. ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... to his present condition. He wrestled with the facts in vain. It became an inextricable tangle. He saw the sky through the ventilator pink with dawn. An old persuasion came out of the dark recesses of his memory. "I must sleep," he said. It appeared as a delightful relief from this mental ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... revolution, and how often have we been gravely told, that it was caused by the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Helvetius. Ridiculous! I have read the history of those times and have read it very differently. I am forced to understand that the inextricable and utter embarrassment of the French finances, the selfish and insolent luxury of the nobles, the desperate wretchedness of the lower orders of the people, and the profligate licentiousness of the Court, were the causes and ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... study of color and its application authorities differ so materially that it is not only impossible to reconcile their theories, but the different terms used to express color thought create inextricable confusion. ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... there is nothing in the whole series of operations displayed in inorganic geology which may not be accounted for by the agency of the ordinary forces of Nature. Those movements of subterranean force which thrust up mountain ranges and upheaved continents stand in inextricable connection, on the one hand, with the volcanoes which are yet belching forth lavas and shaking large tracts of ground, as, on the other, with the primitive incandescent state of the earth. Those forces ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... raccoon, but the madness of the season was racing in the veins of the Hermit's dog and he longed for heroic adventure. So, after slowly circling the tree several times, he threw caution to the winds and closed in. Ringtail was ready, and for a time there was an inextricable tangle of raccoon and dog. Then Pal backed off, bleeding in several places, while the big raccoon, panting and disheveled, still stood with ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... her intellect. And her extravagance was equal to her audacity. She insisted on drawing bills on the treasury without specifying the service. The comptroller-general was in despair, and the state was involved in inextricable embarrassments. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... tangled wreckage which must have weighed hundreds of tons—Krupp guns and gun mountings, twisted almost out of all recognition, masses of machinery ruined beyond redemption, and engines, wagons, rails, and sleepers piled high in inextricable confusion. Many hours, if not days, of unremitting toil would be needed before the line could be reopened for traffic. Thus the main lines of communication of the Germans were severed and a heavy blow struck for the cause ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... patrolling" received. I have called the Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of War, and General-in-Chief together, and submitted it to them, who promise to do their very best in the case. I cannot take it into my own hands without producing inextricable confusion. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... or only after they are formed; on the future life, and the other world. And every sect, every school, every individual, differing on all these points, and each assigning plausible reasons, and respectable though opposite authorities for his opinion, they fell into an inextricable labyrinth ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... the Chair, sharply, and they obeyed. "That, as I have said, was a serious thing. And it was—but for only one of them. But the matter has become graver; for the honour of both is now in formidable peril. Shall I go even further, and say in inextricable peril? Both left out the crucial fifteen words." He paused. During several moments he allowed the pervading stillness to gather and deepen its impressive effects, then added: "There would seem to be ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... scene of surprise, confusion, and delight that followed were impossible. The questions put that were never answered; the answers given to questions never put; the exclamations; the cross purposes; the inextricable conglomeration of past, present, and future history—public, personal, and local; uttered, ejaculated and gasped, in short, or incomplete, or disjointed sentences—all this baffles description. After a few minutes, however, they quieted down, and, while the new arrivals attacked ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... focus instantly destroyed the picture; and so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated the machinery of clairvoyant vision. The inner perception clouded and grew dark. Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable confusion. The wrench seemed almost physical. It happened all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined. And, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he was aware that it had come to pass. He ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... true in the real and proper understanding of the word, not merely in that flowery and allegorical sense which you have described, a sense in which every religion would be true only in different degrees. It is certainly quite in harmony with the inextricable admixture of good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, goodness and wickedness, magnanimity and baseness, which the world presents everywhere, that the most important, the most lofty, and the most sacred truths can make their appearance only in combination with a lie, nay, can borrow strength from a ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... aunts were often called, would look upon him as having led the truants into the army. But Grandison's interposition had shifted from him a weighty anxiety. The boys would not be left friendless and irresponsible in the turbulent streets of Washington. Nor would they, as orderlies, be in continuous or inextricable danger in battle—for whereas the soldier in the line must keep in ranks even when not in actual battle, with the enemy's missiles as destructive as in the charge or combat, the orderlies may take advantage ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... who springs upon and carries off the prey which he tears with wild roars, inspires less horror than the serpent, which silently charms, attracts by degrees, twists in inextricable folds the victim, feels it palpitate under its deadly stings, and seems to feed upon its struggles with as much ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... extends to the east and north, and consists of an irregular series of excavations made in a low line of limestone cliffs which must have been lashed by the waves of the Mediterranean long prior to the beginning of history. These tombs are crowded closely together, ramifying into an inextricable maze, and are separated from each other by such thin walls that one expects every moment to see them give way, and bury the visitors in the ruin. Many date back to a very early period, while all of them have ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... inquiries about a pawnshop, I looked up the French equivalent in the dictionary in order to be able to recognise such a place when I saw it. In my little pocket dictionary I could not find any other word than 'Lombard.' On looking at a map of Paris I found, situated in the middle of an inextricable maze of streets, a very small lane called Rue des Lombards. Thither I wended my way, but my expedition was fruitless. Often, on reading by the light of the transparent lanterns the inscription 'Mont de Piete,' I became ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... can release us from the inextricable confusion of an infinite multiplicity is the realization of an underlying unity, and at the back of all things we find the presence of one Great Affirmative principle without which nothing could have existence. This, then, is the Root of Life; and if ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... returned Hester, "as it ought to be read, until you understand it at least as well as the poet himself. To do a poem justice, the reader must so have pondered phrase and word as to reproduce meaning and music in all the inextricable play of their lights and shades. I never came near doing the kind of thing I mean with any music till I had first learned it thoroughly by heart. And that too is the only way in which I can get ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... operations. When I returned into the town at about 5 o'clock this afternoon, the peninsula of Gennevilliers resembled the course at Epsom on a wet Derby Day. To my civilian eyes, cavalry, artillery, and infantry, seemed to be in inextricable confusion. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... out his pocket-knife, opened it, and went to the body of the dead fakir. He took the long, matted hair into his hand with an exclamation of disgust, but saw at once that his idea was a feasible one. The hair was matted together in an inextricable mass, and could be ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical non sequiturs. And yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sleeping dreams, we imagine ourselves involved in inextricable woe, and enjoy at waking, the ecstasy of a deliverance from it. "And such a deliverance," says Dr. Beattie, "will every good man meet with at last, when he is taken away from the evils of life, and awakes in the regions of everlasting light and peace; looking back upon the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... be needlessly cruel to Mr. Atwood to trace with minuteness the further details of this affair. It is impossible to withhold from him a certain sympathy, or to avoid feeling that a very worthy man, as the world goes, had entangled himself in an inextricable knot of duplicity and tergiversation, by an ill-advised effort to be two opposite things at once. For the sake of true manhood, we gladly turn to consider the ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nombre considerable de tranches s'etaient succede dans l'estomac complaisant de ce nouveau Gargantua, quand on vint lui annoncer que la cavalerie de Henri IV, emportee par sa folle audace, s'etait engagee dans un taillis inextricable. "Il faut, sans delai, lui courir sus, declarerent aussitot tous les lieutenants du duc.—Attendez au moins que j'aie[1] fini mon melon," repondit Mayenne. Et il fallut attendre. En vain insistait-on; en vain, a chaque minute, ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... calculate the probable effect of any political phenomenon, we should notice how far its influence tends to the production of abundance or scarcity, and not simply of cheapness or dearness of price. We must beware of trusting to absolute prices: it would lead to inextricable confusion. ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... branches, all of them, one after another, were ultimately brought into contact with the stick. They then wound themselves round it and round one another, until the whole tendril was tied together in an inextricable knot. The tendrils, though at first quite flexible, after having clasped a support for a time, become more rigid and stronger than they were at first. Thus the plant is secured to its ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... look back and mark out a better course of conduct for the girl. But the girl is gone—the past is past, the life is lived. I was full of the humours and delusions of nineteen years, and I saw the glory and delight of my youth wrecked. Existence was merely inextricable confusion in the dark. I never dreamt of a path appearing, of a return of sunshine, of a story like this ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... a question that Lionel Verner may also have been asking in his inmost heart. As yet he could not look his situation fully in the face. Not from any want of moral courage, but because of the inextricable confusion that his affairs seemed to be in. And, let his moral courage be what it would, the aspect they bore might have caused a more hardy heart than Lionel's to shrink. How much he owed he could not tell; nothing but debt ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Who can tell the mystery of the resurrections of a race, sleeping, worn out, which suddenly awakes brimming like a mountain torrent in the spring!... What would he do with his force? Use it in his turn to explore the inextricable thickets of modern thought? They had no attraction for him. He was oppressed by the menacing dangers which lurked in them. They had crushed his father. Rather than renew that experience and enter the tragic forest he would have set fire to it. He had only to glance at the books ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... more inextricable in passing from specific little incidents to an estimation of the general nature of the man. The logicians lucidly describe definition as being per genus et differentiam. You have the characteristics in which all of the genus partake as common ground, and then you individualise your ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... not mourn for him, and as this lamentable disaster had made her interesting, and as she was assisted and supported by unexpected acts of kindness, and had a good adviser in one of those old Parisian lawyers who would get anybody out of the most inextricable difficulties, she managed to save something from the wreck, and to keep a small income. Then reassured and emboldened, and resting her ultimate illusions and her chimerical hopes on her daughter's radiant beauty, and preparing for ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... screams of little children, swift, wild faces pushing eagerly in this direction and that; oaths and prayers and shoutings; women bowed beneath mattresses and heavy furniture; wheels interlocking in an inextricable mass; horses rearing and plunging in the midst of women separated from their husbands and little children from their mothers; men bearing away their sick and infirm and their clinging little ones; the shower of falling brands, and the roar of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... way to the summit. I concluded that at high water this part of Cataract Canyon would probably annihilate any human being venturing into it, though it is possible high water would make it easier. Where there was driftwood it was in tremendous piles, wedged together in inextricable confusion; hundreds of tree-trunks, large and small, battered and cut and limbless, with the ends pounded into a spongy lot of splinters. The interstices between the large logs were filled with smaller stuff, like boughs, railroad-ties, and ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... of his wife, "Here I am in the very pits of tragic life.... Happily for me, I have learnt to live much in the spirit, and see brightness on the other side of life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable arrow in her flanks would pull me down too." The spirit, the brightness of the other side, that is the secret which beauty can communicate, and the message which she bears ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... about a week following, such an inextricable scramble between the Sieur Hirsch and M. de Voltaire as,—as no reader, not himself in the Jew-Bill line, or paid for understanding it, could consent to have explained to him. Voltaire, by way of mending the bad jewel-bargain, will buy of Hirsch 200 pounds ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... and at first added that 'papa might be well,' and he might go home; but where home was there was no discovering, except that there had been journeys by puff puff; and Louey, and Aunt Emma, and Nurse, and sea, and North something, and 'nasty man,' were in an inextricable confusion. ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by the realism of the great schoolmen. It now found a bold supporter in William of Occam (q.v.), and through him became widely accepted. But nominalism was powerless to inspire theology with new life; on the contrary, its intervention only increased the inextricable tangle of the hairsplitting questions with which theology busied itself, and made their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... commander. "Row out of range, for your lives!" The second cannon spoke, and the whole line of boats was thrown into inextricable confusion. Cannon after cannon rang out, and of the two hundred men who sailed up the river San Juan only ten ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... not for the art of classification and system, no school could have more than ten scholars, as I intend hereafter to show. The great reliance of the teacher is upon this art, to reduce to some tolerable order, what would otherwise be the inextricable confusion of his business. He must be systematic. He must classify and arrange; but after he has done all that he can, he must still expect that his daily business will continue to consist of a vast multitude of minute particulars, from one to ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... were even more appalling, for here the retreating soldiery and the fugitive civilians were mixed in inextricable confusion. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday the road from Antwerp to Ghent, a distance of forty miles, was a solid mass of refugees, and the same was true of every road, every lane, every footpath leading in a westerly or a northerly direction. The people fled in motor-cars and in carriages, ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... administration, and bringing into order the various conflicting authorities which had been handed down from ancient times, royal courts and manor courts, church courts, shire courts, hundred courts, forest courts, and local courts in special franchises, with all their inextricable confusion of law and custom and procedure. Under Henry I. two courts, the Exchequer and the Curia Regis, had control of all the financial and judicial business of the kingdom. The Exchequer filled a far more important ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... of immediate experience will never disclose any fixed order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers, when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so that we spontaneously ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... fleet of small schooners the pirates would sally out into the Gulf and plunder vessels of whatever sort they might encounter. The road to their hiding-place was difficult to follow, either in boats or afoot, for the tortuous bayous that led to it were intertwined in an almost inextricable maze, through which, indeed, the trained pilots of the colony picked their way with ease, but along which no untrained helmsman could follow them. If attack were made by land, the marching force was confronted by impassable rivers and swamps; if by boats, the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... A's name had stayed there with another hussy (giving Miss T's stage name): "There were nice carryings on with the pair of them." I thought of Miss T's strange looks, but could not imagine what hold she had on A., for A. loved me, I knew. I seemed to be in an inextricable maze. I could settle to nothing and was thinking of applying to the police when I heard that the actor A. had mentioned had taken his company to the Gippsland lakes. I followed to Sale, found the actor and was told that A. was not there. "She slipped me at the last moment," he said, "and remained ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
