"Pitfall" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speaking, we did not mention the oversight and contented ourselves with drinking out of the bottles in true democratic spirit. Did you ever imbibe Tiffany Water direct from its native heath, as it were? No? Then let me warn you from that lurking pitfall. It has the same taste, but the effect, di mi, the ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... initiative, he was compelled to speak to her. No language could describe the anguish and difficulty of these approaches. His way was beset by obstacles and perils, by traps and snares; and at every turn there waited for him the shameful pitfall of the aitch. He whose easy courtesy charmed away the shyness of Miss Flossie Walker, whose conversation (when he deigned to converse) was the wonder and delight of the ladies of his boarding-house, now ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the full daylight. The very keenness of the animal seems sometimes to work his undoing. He knows well that the dogs cannot catch him so he jollies along just in front of them over his accustomed route where he knows every possible pitfall of the way. And the hunter waiting to leeward shoots him. Had the fox had fewer brains and simply bolted in a panic as soon as the dogs got on his trail he might have lived to bolt again the next time. Once in a while you find a panicky fox that does this. When the dogs get ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... doings are the chief concern, and where a broad, well-informed outlook on life is rare. Since so many of my colleagues insist that young Ph.D.'s tend constantly to "shoot over the heads" of their students, the best way of avoiding this particular pitfall seems to lie along the road of simple, elementary, concrete fact. The discussion method in the classroom will soon put the instructor right if he has gone to the other extreme of depreciating his students through kindergarten ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... glistening black eyes! But he is now a "fish out of water," and is about as helpless, nature never having intended him to be seen outside of his burrow—at least, in this present form. There he dwells, setting his circular trap at the mouth of his pitfall, and waiting for the voluntary sacrifice of his insect ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... according to the popular expression, was so 'slow' as to perform a fatal surgical operation upon himself, in emulation of a juggling-trick achieved by his arch- enemy at breakfast-time; not even he fell half so readily into the snare prepared for him, as the old lady did into this artful pitfall. The fact of Tackleton having walked out; and furthermore, of two or three people having been talking together at a distance, for two minutes, leaving her to her own resources; was quite enough to have put ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... old if they had not in unwary infancy tumbled into the enormous rainwater-troughs with which every well-regulated house was furnished. I have seen one or two of these having a capacity of fifty barrels dug from a single tulip bole. In such a pitfall some budding Washington or Lincoln may have been whelmed without causing so much as a ripple on the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... manned, ready to row round by the cliff. One party had gone toward the Warren, another to Yellow Rock. All were filled with the keenest desire not only to aid their comrades, but to be revenged on those who had snared them into this cunningly-devised pitfall. But amid all this zeal arose the question, What ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... hurrying figure stopped and turned quickly, he did not pause, but rather hastened his steps. He saw her lift her muff up to her heart, saw her waver, then move resolutely toward him. She came thus two or three steps, when a treacherous pitfall in the snow opened under her frightened feet and she went down almost shoulder ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... punish fraud when it is detected, is the proper act of vindictive justice; but to prevent frauds, and make punishment unnecessary, is the great employment of legislative wisdom. To permit Intromission, and to punish fraud, is to make law no better than a pitfall. To tread upon the brink is safe; but to come a step further is destruction. But, surely, it is better to enclose the gulf, and hinder all access, than by encouraging us to advance a little, to entice us ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... been almost painful. Men who have attained self-repression are occasionally open to a perilous onrush of feeling. Believing that they know themselves, they walk boldly forward towards the high-road and the pitfall alike. ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... moral pitfall is more potent in Hong Kong than in India or other Eastern lands possessing a sprinkling of Europeans. A newcomer's ears hear little but "chit." Every sentence uttered by friends, every proposal of obsequious native merchant, is freighted with the little word. You decide at last to cast off ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... traitor to the emperor. Such a noble! Of such high talents! What is human greatness? I often said, this can't end happily. His might, his greatness, and this obscure power Are but a covered pitfall. The human being May not be trusted to self-government. The clear and written law, the deep-trod footmarks Of ancient custom, are all necessary To keep him in the road of faith and duty. The authority intrusted to this man Was unexampled and unnatural, It placed him on ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... his theatrical experience gave him a thorough knowledge of the capabilities of the human voice, and the practical common-sense which was always one of his most striking characteristics prevented him from ever treating it from the merely instrumental point of view, a pitfall into which many of the great composers have fallen. He left Italy for London in 1710, and produced his 'Rinaldo' at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket the following year. It was put upon the stage with unexampled ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... with Pitfall and with Gin Beset the Road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with Predestination round Enmesh me, and impute ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... him, a desire to make the last drops of life delightful; if well done, this would produce a certain sort of horror, that I do not remember to have seen effected in literature. Possibly the ancient emigrant might be supposed to have fallen into an ancient mine, down a precipice, into some pitfall; no, not so. Into a river; into a moat. As Middleton's pretensions to birth are not publicly known, there will be no reason why, at his sudden death, suspicion should fix on Eldredge as the murderer; and it shall be his object so ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Korong who had tried in vain to reach the bough, and perished. Tu-Kila-Kila had made high feast on the victim's flesh; his bones, now collected together and cunningly fastened with native rope, served at once as a warning and as a trap or pitfall for all who might rashly venture ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... look, and was not surprised to find myself alone. The evergreen-clothed amphitheatre behind had many paths which would instantly hide climbers from view. The blue man and the woman with floating hair knew these heights well. I thought of the pitfall, and sat watching with back-tilted head, anxious to warn them if they stirred foliage near where that fatal trap was said to lurk. But the steep forest gave no sign or sound from its ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... but he supposed it was mostly for the amusement he afforded her, and for the sake of Jerrie, of whom she was never tired of talking. Maude's friendship was very sweet to the young man, who had so few means of enjoyment, and whose life was one of toil and care. So he went blindly on toward the pitfall in the distance, and began at last to look forward with a great deal of pleasure to the readings or talks with Maude, even though he did not find her very intellectual. She amused and rested him, and that was something to the tired and ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... tigers. We want you to find out, for us, when a tiger was last seen near the village; where its lair is supposed to be; and whether, according to its situation, we should have the best chance of killing it by digging a pitfall, on the path by which it usually comes from the jungle; or by getting a kid and tying it up, to attract the tiger to a spot where we shall be stationed in ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... this manner was immense, and of the best quality; but it had no other effect upon Dora than to depress her spirits, and make her always nervous with the dread that it would be her turn next. I found myself in the condition of a schoolmaster, a trap, a pitfall; of always playing spider to Dora's fly, and always pouncing out of my ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... which candidates propose to themselves in writing is to convey no meaning at all. And here is a quite unsuspected pitfall into which they successively plunge headlong. For it is precisely in such cryptographies that mankind are prone to seek for and find a wonderful amount and variety of significance. Omne ignotum pro mirifico. How do we admire at the antique world striving to crack those ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... him by the arm and sought to read his face what had happened. Something disastrous she was sure; something which he had feared and was partially prepared for, yet which in happening had crushed him. Was it a pitfall into which the poor little lady had fallen? If so—But he is speaking—mumbling low words to himself. Some of them she can hear. He is reproaching himself—repeating over and over that he should never have ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... certain unknown men. A dark conspiracy was on foot in the midst of us; and our beloved and innocent friend had been entangled in its meshes. When the Christian hero of a hundred charitable victories plunges into a pitfall that has been dug for him by mistake, oh, what a warning it is to the rest of us to be unceasingly on our guard! How soon may our own evil passions prove to be Oriental noblemen who pounce ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... his will voluntarily, The devil and the whirlwind go with him: I will you never fro thence tidings bring; Go you before, and show me the way, And as to follow you I will not say nay: For, by God's body, and you be in once, By the mass, I will shit[150] the door at once, And then ye be take in a pitfall. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... thee, World! know all these beauties Mere shows and snares; know thee a gilded serpent, A flowery bank whose sweets smile o'er a pitfall; A splendid prison, precious tomb, fair palace, Whose golden domes allure poor wanderers in, And when they've entered, crush them! Such I know thee And, knowing, loath thy charms! Rise, rise, ye storms! Mingle ye elements! Flash lightnings, flash! Unmask this witch! blast her ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... scrupulously confined; conventional rules of every conceivable denomination hurried out to restrain his genius, with the alacrity of Lilliputians pegging down a Gulliver; wherever he turned he was met by a hiatus or a pitfall, a blind-alley or a mot bas. But his triumph was not simply the conquest of these refractory creatures; it was something much more astonishing. It was the creation, in spite of them, nay, by their very aid, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Pauline's wild voice in his ears and Pauline's pale face before his eyes. Yet, the peril over, he breathed freely again, and carefully holding on by the rail all along the path lest some other treacherous pitfall should lurk beneath the snow, reached the end of the ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... the Irish occurs to you. Because here is a mysterious paradox. The America always damns the Irishman. It is his foible. But if an Englishman joins in, instantly every American within earshot hates him for it. I plead with you to avoid that pitfall. The bottom of it is paved with ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... mean, of course, that we can get along without the use of abstract and general terms in our thinking and speaking, but we should be on our constant guard against viewing them as forces and attributing to them the vigor of personality. Animism is, as already explained, a pitfall which is always yawning before us and into which we are sure to plunge unless we are ever watchful. Platonism is its most amiable and ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... London which would be accounted rank heresy here. There is light abroad which must one day reach to the ends of the earth, and truly it sometimes seemeth to me that if the priests, the abbots, and the monks set their faces steadfastly against this light, they will fall into some terrible pitfall, but they will never quench the light ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... innocent and normal. Besides, I was thinking what I should say to Pavannes when I saw him—in what terms I should warn him of his peril, and cast his perfidy in his teeth. We had hurried along in this way—and in absolute silence, save when some obstacle or pitfall drew from us an exclamation—for about a quarter of a mile, when my companion, turning into a slightly wider street, slackened her speed, and indicated by a gesture that we had arrived. A lamp hung over the porch, to which she pointed, and showed the small side gate half open. ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... to say to her," I cried in great heat, vexed and irritated beyond measure at her capricious temper. I should only be dragged into some pitfall, some snare, some dire unpleasantness. But what did I know of her real character? What of my first doubts and suspicions? She had by no means dispelled them. She had only bamboozled me by her insinuating ways, had drawn me on by her guileful cleverness to pity and promises to befriend her. I had ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... purpose, I made snares to hamper them; and I do believe they were more than once taken in them; but my tackle was not good, for I had no wire, and I always found them broken, and my bait devoured. At length I resolved to try a pitfall: so I dug several large pits in the earth, in places where I had observed the goats used to feed, and over those pits I placed hurdles, of my own making too, with a great weight upon them; and several times I put ears of barley and dry rice, without ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... ascribe a great deal too much potency to the grave," said Septimius, pausing involuntarily alone by the little hillock, whose contents he knew so well. "The grave seems to me a vile pitfall, put right in our pathway, and catching most of us,—all of us,—causing us to tumble in at the most inconvenient opportunities, so that all human life is a jest and a farce, just for the sake of this inopportune death; for I observe it never waits for us to accomplish anything: ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Esme Elliot, snarer of men's eyes and hearts, sharpening her wits and weapons for the fray; aye, even preparing her pitfall. Cunningly she made a bower of one end of the broad living-room at Greenvale with great sprays of apple blossoms from the orchard, ravishing untold spoilage of her mother and forerunner, Eve, for the bedecking of the quiet, cozy nook. Pink ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... word "ornamentation" to them, with the implication that the savages look upon them as beautiful, although all that the observers had a right to say was that they pleased the savages and were approved by fashion. What is worse, the philosophers fell into the pitfall thus dug for them. Darwin thinks that the mutilations indulged in by savages show "how different is the standard of taste"; Humboldt (III., 236) reflects on the strange fact that nations "attach the idea of beauty" to whatever configuration nature has given ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the Pitfall & Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept Eliza from sinking ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... walled city with the palm-trees hanging over; He was Captain of the Cygnet, and it sank before his eyes; The Englishmen ashore, they're taken in the pitfall, Good lack! they toil in galleys or their souls ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... in this final scene? But his error was a generous one, since he fought for what he deemed the honor of New England; and, now that death has paid the forfeit, the most rigid may forgive him. If that dark pitfall—that bloody grave—had not lain in the midst of his path, whither, whither might it not have led him! It has ended there: yet so strong was my conception of his energies, so like destiny did it appear that he should achieve everything ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... perform a fatal surgical operation upon himself, in emulation of a juggling trick achieved by his arch enemy at breakfast-time; not even he fell half so readily into the snare prepared for him as the old lady into this artful pitfall. The fact of Tackleton having walked out; and furthermore, of two or three people having been talking together at a distance, for two minutes, leaving her to her own resources; was quite enough to have put her on her dignity, and the bewailment of that mysterious ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Another pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines may change roles. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way, exaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity is sin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemption might mean extrication from ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... she led him along the devious, unsuspicious path that conducted to the trap and then suddenly shot at him the question that should have plunged him into it, he very quietly and nimbly walked around the pitfall. Again and again she tried to involve him, but ever with the same result. He was abashed, ready to answer—and always elusive. At the end she had gained nothing from him, and for a minute stood looking silently at him ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... Valley of Grump is a sad, sad place, And a dangerous pitfall, too, So easy it seems to slip into its depths— And some of the little folks do! Oh, I'm sorry for them when I witness their woe, Their faces all wrinkle and twist about so; And to their assistance I gladly would go— But I dread the sad Valley ...
— Dew Drops, Vol. 37, No. 34, August 23, 1914 • Various
... when he had crossed the Don and was free of the town, "what said the knave groom? I must go till I come to it. Ay, and who knoweth when that shall be, and who knoweth the way in this pitfall of bogs? Three scrub trees, saith he, and all together on one little solid place. I would I might ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... be honest, sincere, enduring; otherwise the clumsy royal octavos of Leslie Stephen's edition of Fielding would be as attractive as "the dear and dumpy twelves" of the original editions. Royal octavo, indeed, seems to be the pitfall of the book designer, though there is no inherent objection to it. Where in the whole range of reference books will be found a more attractive set of volumes than Moulton's "Library of Literary Criticism," with their realization in this format of the Horatian ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... some reason to suspect that our friend Harry, who was an habitual rider, and knew all the environs of Oldport pretty well, and was fonder of short cuts and going over grass than most American horsemen are, had not been altogether ignorant of the existence of the pitfall; it looked very much as if he had led Edwards, who was no particular friend of his, purposely into it: but if such was the case, he kept his own counsel. When the fallen man and mare had scrambled out of the hole, which they did before Benson had offered to help them, or Ashburner had time ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... greater pitfall before us is that we read history not as men, but as gods, knowing the event. The name of Marathon to us implies not struggle, not danger, but triumph; and as we think of the little band of Athenians defiling from the mountains ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... accustomed to the luxuries of the foreigners, who, even in times of war, carry great stores of what seems to Eastern nations, unnecessary baggage. With them their endless string of wagons is their greatest pitfall, and with us these latter could be ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... ground at my feet broke sharply away. Setting my back to the storm again, I followed the lip of this ditch around the wall's angle. Here it shallowed, and here, too, was shelter; but not wishing to mistake a bed of nettles or any such pitfall for solid earth, I kept pretty wide as I went on. The house was dark on this side, and the wall, as before, had no opening. Close beside the next angle there grew a mass of thick gorse bushes, and pushing through these I found myself suddenly on a ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... leading up to his capture and imprisonment, not forgetting to lay the blame on himself for being so gullible as to be led into such a pitfall. ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... into the rowdiest and dirtiest of disbanded officers. I never fathomed the mystery of his military costume, but conjectured that a lurking sense of fitness had induced him to exchange his clerical garments for this habit of a sinner; nor can I tell precisely into what pitfall, not more of vice than terrible calamity, he had precipitated himself,—being more than satisfied to know that the outcasts of society can sink no lower than this poor, desecrated ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... darkly with the sea. Who was this figure standing over yonder? what was this thing lying down there? And a frightful doubt of the reality of what he could see made even the remnant of sight that remained to him an added torment, a pitfall always open for his miserable pretense. He was afraid to stumble inexcusably over something—to say a fatal Yes or No to a question. The hand of God was upon him, but it could not tear him away from his child. And, as if in a nightmare of humiliation, ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... [Fr.], undercurrent. implication, logical implication; logical consequence; entailment. allusion, insinuation; innuendo &c 527; adumbration; something rotten in the state of Denmark [Hamlet]. snake in the grass &c (pitfall) 667; secret &c 533. darkness, invisibility, imperceptibility. V. be latent &c adj.; lurk, smolder, underlie, make no sign; escape observation, escape detection, escape recognition; lie hid &c 528. laugh in one's sleeve; keep back &c (conceal) 528. involve, imply, understand, allude to, infer, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... star which guided me from the pitfall of wedded life! What an escape! I must inform Monsieur le Marquis. He will certainly relish this bit of scandal which all but happened at his own fireside. Certainly I shall inform him. It will be like caviar to ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... then?" cried Barbara; "or where is the good of being a gentleman? Is it that he knows better how to lie to a woman? A knight used to be every woman's castle of refuge; a gentleman now, it seems, is a pitfall in the bush!" ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... fall into a treacherous bog, if only you see a sprig of purple heather—a good, honest plant, which hates anything secret. Our ponies didn't need the heather signal, though; they shied away from bogs as if by instinct, they knew the moor so well. If we had stumbled into a pitfall, our only hope would have been to lie quite flat, and crawl along the surface with the same motion that you make ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... effect of the scheme, as existing at that moment, was likely to be"—Lord Milner himself at Capetown was at one and the same time overwhelmed with detailed criticisms from Uitlanders, anxious that no legal pitfall or administrative obstacle should remain undetected, and besieged with cables from the Colonial Office requesting precise information upon any point upon which an energetic member of the House of Commons might have chosen to interrogate the Secretary of State. And, in addition to this rain ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... other crittur? It is just another example of want of intelligence! You read the words, and never trouble about the connection. Who in their sane senses would ask you to compare a warrior king with old Miss Yonge? A little reflection would have saved you from the pitfall into which you have all fallen headlong. Five bad marks each! Now, then, for the next two. What have you got to say about the ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... rope from his saddle-bag and tied it about the priest's waist and his own. "If you have any holy pitfall in view for me, I shall have the pleasure of your company. And if I am led into labyrinths to die of starvation, you at least will have a meal: ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... catchy starter, I could tell her about Nowhere, how these five other buggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after this scavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces in that situation, how we set a pitfall for their alky-powered jeep and wrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out to be unexpectedly big the four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down together and amused each other for a while and played ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... distant houses—with their heads all the while insanely twisted back over their shoulders, and the glare of their eyes fixed frightfully on the swift-footed Mad Dominie, till souse over neck and ears, bubble and squeak, precipitated into traitorous pitfall, and in a moment ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... seizing me with one hand by the collar, and hauling, or rather lifting me back, as if I had been a poodle dog. "Why, you were as near as possible into a pitfall." ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... conscience-stricken. He was by no means a tender man, but his lately-discovered misfortune had unhinged him, and this strange, undeserved, disinterested family fealty on the part of Charlie touched his heart. And should he still try to lead him into the pitfall he had dug? He hesitated;—no, he would show him the place by broad daylight, and if he chose to overlook the "caving bank," it would be his ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... in this tunnel, and there was no space in which to attempt to kindle a light. Once the thought came into Gaston's head that if he were falling into a treacherous pitfall laid for him with diabolic ingenuity by his foes, nothing could well be better than to entrap him into such a place as this, where it would be almost impossible to go forward or back, and quite out of his power to strike a single ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... "to make the action more nervous." The book begins well with a description of Herod's court and Rome in Judea, but as a whole it is unsatisfactory. Once the plot develops Saltus seems to lose interest. He lazily quotes whole scenes from the Bible (George Moore very cleverly avoided this pitfall in "The Brook Kerith"). The early chapters suggest "Imperial Purple," which appeared a year later and upon which he may well have been at work at this time. There is a foreshadowing, too, of "The Lords of the Ghostland" in a very amusing and slightly cynical passage in which Mary as a child ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... You are fat, and many words may melt ye, This is three Bawdes beaten into one; bless me Heaven, What shall become of me? I am i'th' pitfall: O' my conscience, this is the old viper, and all these little ones Creep every night into her belly; do you hear plump servant And you my little sucking Ladies, you must teach me, For I know you are excellent at ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (2 of 10) - The Humourous Lieutenant • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... tribes; they appeal to the common passions of fear and emulation when they tame the wild steed, to the common desire of greed and gain when they snare the fishes of the stream, or allure the wolves to the pitfall by the bleating of the lamb. In their turn, in the older ages of the world, it was by the passions which men had in common with the demon race that the fiends commanded or allured them. The dwarf whom ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this as purely irrelevant humor, with possibly a trap or pitfall in it, moved away from the fireplace without a word, and retired to the adjoining kitchen to prepare supper. Presently ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... at Mrs. Frostwinch walking before him in a shimmer of Boston respectability. He had an uneasy feeling that he was passing from one pitfall to another. He was keenly conscious of the richness of the voice of the girl by his side, so that he felt that it was not easy for him to disagree with anything which she said. He let her ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... tables and the management of their drawing-rooms. If I do, there shall be no deceit. I certainly shall not marry for love. Indeed, from early years I never thought it possible that I should do so. I have floundered unawares into the pitfall, and now I must flounder out. I have always thought that there was much in the world well worth the living for besides love. Ambition needs not be a closed book for women, unless they choose to close it. I do not see but that a statesman's wife may stand nearly as high in the world as the statesman ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... The pitfall[50] is little used. It consists of a hole large enough for a wild boar or deer, carefully covered so as to deceive the animal. The bottom bristles with ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... please, sir—your honor's will be done. Our guests are now, even as the visits of angels, unco few and far between; and thus, when one comes, we are loath to part with him. There is a deep pitfall, and an ugly gullyhole where the burn crosses the road at the town-head, and if ye miss the path, the rocks by the beach are steep, and in a ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... plain, you'll hear them talk Of fires, rocks, torrents, that obstruct their walk: Another, unlike these, but not more sane, Takes fires and torrents for the open plain: Let mother, sister, father, wife combined Cry 'There's a pitfall! there's a rock! pray mind!' They'll hear no more than drunken Fufius, he Who slept the part of queen Ilione, While Catienus, shouting in his ear, Roared like a Stentor, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... purpose in order to hoodwink the public. They now separated the executive and judiciary from each other and from the legislature, divided the latter into two branches, so as to cool the heat of popular sentiment before it was expressed in statutes, and, avoiding the pitfall dug for itself by the National Assembly, made members of the Convention eligible for election ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... came to reason soberly over the adventure, the conclusion seemed obvious that the pitfall had been a consequent upon the breaking out of one of the ancient springs, so that the water, in endeavoring to find an outlet, had finally undermined the whole roadway. The chasm, as he looked back upon it, extended dear across the ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... fishing. He had supposed the horse grazing near by, enjoying semi-freedom with his grass. Now it seemed far otherwise. Miss Sapphira had even had him telephone to Bob to bring her hither. With his own hands he had dug his pitfall. ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... from a miser's standpoint, could not understand that there might lurk in the Indian a tinge of sentiment. He was mistaken, and the mistake was a little pitfall placed ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... enemy who never showed himself. The sky had become overcast, the darkness was profound, and one by one the regiments marched out in deepest silence, an array of phantoms stealing away into the bosom of the night. Every heart beat joyfully, however, as if they were escaping from some treacherous pitfall; already in imagination the troops beheld themselves under the walls of Paris, where their revenge ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... hoof-prints then through the trackless bush, painfully slow going over the stones and the fallen trunks, with many a pitfall concealed under the smooth moss. After an hour of this he finally came upon them all five standing dejectedly about in a narrow opening, as if ashamed of their escapade and perfectly willing to ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... counsel thee to beware? But thou wilt tumble into thine own pitfall. The trap is laid for thine ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the chetah and that after that I'd come straight home. Well, the day seemed young and I thought if I hurried I could go home the roundabout way by the pitfalls in such good time that Ivy wouldn't know the difference. Well, sir, I came to the first pitfall—and, lo and behold! something had been and taken the bait and got away with it without so much as putting a foot through the wattling. I'd woven it too strong. So I thought I'd just weaken it up a little—it ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... Another pitfall about using whole grains is that to be nutritious they must still be fresh enough to sprout vigorously. A seed is a package of food surrounding an embryo. The living embryo is waiting for the right conditions (temperature and moisture) to begin sprouting. Sprouting means the embryo begins eating ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... the smoke from the tepees of the reservation, and a light from a log cabin, and draws a breath of relief. But not yet, O brave little frontier girl, O gallant little steed, is the race won and the danger passed! Not yet, oh, not yet! for just ahead there is a treacherous pitfall which neither Tam nor his mistress sees,—a hollow that some little animal has burrowed out, and into this Tam plunges a forefoot, stumbles, ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... little knowing what a pitfall had been dug in his seemingly prosperous path, was still at Royston, enjoying the most intimate familiarity with the king, when the messenger returned. Deception was so much of an avowed principle with King James, and was so earnestly supported by him, as one of the functions and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... light. Nor did I pause for close inspection, but, so soon as search revealed an opening into a narrow passageway beyond, I pressed forward amid dense gloom, feeling my way, fearful lest I meet some pitfall. It was a low, contracted gallery, so extremely irregular in excavation that I sometimes stood erect, unable to reach the roof with extended fingers, yet a moment later was compelled to creep on ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... true; for the deception of the counterfeit depends wholly upon its likeness to the real. Herein is revealed the reason for calling that a lie or deception which is externally so like the truth. Certainly there could be no greater pitfall for souls than a system which seems to be the truth of God, and yet robs its followers of any basis for a true hope, and it will be found that the most terrible condemnation of Scripture is uttered against such ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... and next to supply it. This is reasonable in appearance. It would seem to be good commercially, and, as a policy, I should consider it good for art, which must consult the popular taste or lose its vitality. But a pitfall lies between this theory of editorial selection and its successful practice. The editor must really know what the public wants. If he does not, he becomes a dogmatic critic of a ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... boastful misery to tempt his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall by ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... which truth fills its keeper, slowly and sadly she unfolded the closed story. "What had Master Hector to do with Alice Boswell? He had to do with her as a man has to do with his heart's desire, his snare, his pitfall." ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... His leadership of it, to be successful, had to be accompanied with plenary powers, even if the stultification of the government itself were the consequence. When the patriotism of the President yielded to this, the suggestion of McClellan twenty years afterward, that it had all been a pitfall prepared for him, would be revolting if, in view of the records, the absurdity of it did not prove that its origin was in a morbid imagination. It is far more difficult to deal leniently with the exhibition of character in his private letters, which were injudiciously added ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... which hardly any is more disagreeable in letters. This is the manifestation of what is called, in various more or less familiar terms, "giving oneself airs," "side," "patronising," etc. He may sometimes come near this pitfall of "intellectuals," but he never quite slips into it, being probably preserved by that sense of humour which he certainly possessed, though he seldom gave vent to it in verse and not very often in prose. Taking them altogether, Gray's letters may be said to have few superiors in the ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... yet unpractised in philosophical reflection, Bergson's skill and clarity of statement, his fertility in illustration, his frequent and picturesque use of analogy may be a pitfall. It all sounds so convincing and right, as Bergson puts it, that the critical faculty is put to sleep. There is peril in this, particularly here, where we have to deal with so bold and even revolutionary a doctrine. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... cannot see more, I am afraid of Hell. In my own narrow little path I dare not walk because I think that one has dug a pitfall for me; and if I put my hand to take a fruit I draw it back again because I think it has been kissed already. If I look out across the plains, the mounds are burial heaps; and when I pass among the ...
— Dreams • Olive Schreiner
... "Pilgrim's Progress" that when Christian had left the Interpreter's House, he strayed away and went down into the Valley of Humiliation, where he walked between the snares and was in danger of falling into many a pitfall; there he wandered through darkness; there he could not see the Delectable Mountains any more, and there he fought with Giant Apollyon for his life; but when Christian passed that way he did not find it half so bad by any means. He had a companion ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... disputant is so eager to refute an opponent as to lay down, or imply, principles from which an easy inference destroys his own position. To appeal to a principle of greater sweep than the occasion requires may easily open the way to this pitfall: as if a man should urge that 'all men are liars,' as the premise of an argument designed to show that another's assertion is ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... made a wall ahead of him which was imminent and indiscernible. It was like a great weight upon his shoulders and a pitfall at ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... to cure are not worthy of much care; but they have dependants; and it is of the women and children that I think. Here is another pitfall into which the eager novice stumbles; and once more on grounds of expediency I ask the novice to consider his position. According to the decision of the peculiarly-constituted senate which rules racing affairs, I understand that, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... admitted, getting along very well, considering that he had only been presented to the young lady ten minutes before. That was Dick's way; and when the young lady is attractive, it is a way that has many recommendations, only sometimes it leads to a pitfall—a cold answer, ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... conspicuous lapses of his predecessors Raymond with all his guile fell into another pitfall. He lauded the Rose, the Daisy, the Garland of Vine Leaves worn by Eleanor, Marguerite, and Beatrice in three canzonets so perfect in form, so exquisite in diction that they rivalled the ditties of Thibault of Champagne, who was ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... then, for Arras, where one would have liked to linger, nay, to stay a week or a few days. But this wishing to stay a week at a picturesque place is often a dangerous pitfall, as the amiable Charles Collins has shown in his own quaint style. Has anyone, he asks, ever, 'on arriving at some place he has never visited before, taken a sudden fancy to it, committed himself to apartments for a month certain, gone on praising the locality ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... engineers to contractors there is many a snare and pitfall for the unwary feet of the beginner. In superintending the construction of work the engineer may err on the side of unreasonable strictness or on that of improper leniency. If so disposed, he can involve any contractor in loss and do him great wrong, but it more often ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... young. For this purpose I made snares to hamper them; and I do believe they were more than once taken in them; but my tackle was not good, for I had no wire, and I always found them broken and my bait devoured. At length I resolved to try a pitfall; so I dug several large pits in the earth, in places where I had observed the goats used to feed, and over those pits I placed hurdles of my own making too, with a great weight upon them; and several times I put ears of barley and dry rice without setting the trap; and I could easily perceive that ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... Sir Percy's bantering mood did not quite fit in with his own elaborate plans, moreover the ex-ambassador feared a pitfall of some sort, and did not quite like to trust to ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was not absolutely sure that I had hit the mark, for in nature, like everything else, every law has its exceptions, and I might possibly have dug a pitfall for myself. On the other hand, if I were right, Esther would no doubt be convinced for the moment, but her belief would speedily disappear if she chanced to discover that the correspondence of moles on the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... as well as to your brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. Suffer no evil-speaking; you must either silence the persons, or escape it by withdrawing from them. If you value your peace of mind, you must from the start avoid this pitfall, which I greatly fear for ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... to us before you come again?" Hansie inquired. "By what sign will you know that we have been taken and that Harmony is a pitfall ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... rattled on,—Mr Ramsden's servant crouching in a corner, as far as possible from Mrs Forster, evidently about as well pleased with his company as one would be in a pitfall with a tiger. At last it stopped at the door of the lunatic asylum, and the post-boy dismounting from his reeking horses, pulled violently at a large bell, which answered with a most lugubrious tolling, and struck awe into the breast of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... that he was locked up for a debt of only twenty crowns, and that his desire to be at liberty was so great that if M. de Chateauneuf would pay that sum for him he would undertake to deliver the Queen of Scotland from her danger, by stabbing Elizabeth: to this proposal, M. de Trappes, who saw the pitfall laid for the French ambassador, was greatly astonished, and said that he was certain that M. de Chateauneuf would consider as very evil every enterprise having as its aim to threaten in any way the life of Queen Elizabeth or the peace of the realm; then, not desiring to hear more, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Ah Ben; "the law of Karma is the law of nature and the law of God; and while ordinarily she would have passed safely on in the possession of her new-born powers, the pitfall which I blindly laid beset her unwary feet, and she fell. There is but one course open; but one way in which Dorothy can reach either heaven or earth, by a shorter road than that which I am compelled to travel. It is simple, and yet one which, under the circumstances, ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... this terrible pitfall he trudged in the darkness, saying over and again to himself, "I'll git even with Nate Griggs; he'll hev no grant, no land, no gold—no more 'n me. I'll ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... Similarly, while there is no doubt a bright future for somebody in Celluloid, Fiberloid, and Other Factitious Goods, instinct tells me that there is none for—" he pulled up on the verge of saying, "James Braithwaite Crocker," and shuddered at the nearness of the pitfall. "—for—" he hesitated again—"for Algernon Bayliss," ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... be myself or I shall be playing hypocrite to dig my own pitfall," she said to herself, while taking counsel with Laetitia as to the route for their walk, and admiring a becoming ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are directly at variance with the ideals that have been supposed to guide England and America. Incidentally the work speaks of the Negro and negroid population of Africa as "estimated at about 120,000,000." This low estimate has proved a common pitfall for writers. If we remember that Africa is three and a half times as large as the United States, and that while there are no cities as large as New York and Chicago, there are many centers of very ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... on till they came close to a clump of large trees, and then brought them to a pitfall which he had dug, about six feet wide and eight feet ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... that the Puritan did not condemn bear-baiting because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator. The Puritan regarded beauty as a pitfall and a snare: that which gave pleasure was a sin; he found his gratification in doing without things. Puritanism was a violent oscillation of the pendulum of life to the other side. From the vanity, pretense, affectation and sensualism of a Church and State bitten by corruption, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... covered with light branches and leaves, and located in the path where a tiger has been tracked. For some reason this animal, having once passed through a jungle, will ever after follow as nearly as possible his own foot-prints, and can thus easily be led into a pitfall of the character we have described. Having once got into this well he cannot possibly get out, and here he is permitted to become so nearly starved as to deprive him of all powers of resistance, in which condition he is ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... musical measure of poetic prose as rendered by Mr. Artman, one of the most renowned blind authors—"There is a world to which night brings no gloom, no sadness, no impediments; fills no yawning chasm and hides from the traveler no pitfall. It is the world of sound. Silence is its night, the only darkness of which the blind have any knowledge. In it every attribute of Nature has a voice; the beautiful, the grand, the sublime, have each a language, and to me, whose heart is in tune, every sound ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... men who do things. The world judges by outward appearances. If your heart is sick, if your courage is low, don't show it. Put up a stiff attitude and act with confidence and that attitude will carry you over many a pitfall ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... and may explain, though perhaps not excuse, the defects of my work. One who undertakes to express the thoughts of antiquity in modern idiom goes to his task with his eyes open, and has no right at every stumbling-block or pitfall to bemoan his unhappy fate. So also with the particular difficulties presented by the great founder of Latin style—his constant use of superlatives, his doubling and trebling of nearly synonymous terms, the endless shades of meaning in such common words as officium, fides, studium, humanitas, ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... above was written Prof. Lloyd Morgan has published a closely similar notice of the passage in question. "This language," he says, "seems to savour of teleology (that pitfall of the evolutionist). The cart is put before the horse. The recognition-marks were, I believe, not produced to prevent intercrossing, but intercrossing has been prevented because of preferential mating between individuals ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... The second pitfall to avoid is any pulling or straining of the material during the operation of embroidering it. Success in avoiding this depends primarily upon the various threads being drawn at each stitch to the proper tension, so that it may just have ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... little previous frost, lay soft and thick over the whole ground; it covered the holes in the bridges, and so choked up the drains that in many places they were completely concealed, and what appeared to be a smooth level surface of ground might really be a dangerous pitfall. Here, however, Clarkson chose to go. He flogged his horse unmercifully, and the sleigh flew over the ground, scattering the snow and striking every moment against some roughness of the road which it concealed. They ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Marquardt Roem. Alterth. III. i. p. 294 sq. Even De Wette has not escaped the pitfall, for he states that 'according to Strabo Cyprus was governed by propraetors,' and he therefore supposes that Strabo and Dion Cassius are at variance. De Wette's error stands uncorrected ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... third. A party, headed by Savignon, went out to meet them. They found a few men, dragging and carrying weary loads. There had been an accident to M. Destournier. He had stumbled into an unseen pitfall and broken his leg. They had carried him on a litter for two days, then he had begged the others to leave him with an attendant, and hurry onward, coming back for ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... pretty enough on the two feet of white paper on which it is drawn; but when the pattern is manifolded, it is usually found that the designer has not taken into account the effect of the repetition. That is the pitfall into which the Kensington student usually falls; he cannot make practical application of his knowledge, and at Minton's factory all the designs drawn by Kensington students have to be redrawn by those who understand the practical working out of ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... my deeds, all, bad as they have been,— The way was dark, the awful pitfall bare;— In my weak hands, up through the fires of sin, I hold them for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... after all, leave a grain of hope till her child gets so rooted in her heart that"—But conscience and good sense interrupted this temporary thought, and made him see to what a horrible life of suspense he should condemn a human creature, and live a perpetual lie, and be always at the edge of some pitfall or other. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... like one imprisoned in a sand drift, not to be crossed in any direction, but closing in and weighing down. She was in a pitfall, overpowered like Gratian had been, subjugated, soon to be put to the yoke and compelled to draw steadily the harrow of transcendental politics. Her caprices, faults, fancies, duplicities, wiles, caresses, impudence, conquests ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas |
