"Smothering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... got assault and battery against us, and smothering-with-a-pillow, to say nothing of burglary, breaking and entering, and banjo-playing after 10 P. M. We won't any of us live long enough to serve out our sentences, not even if we get old enough to make ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... bronzed mowers lie in the shade for their short rest, and willingly pay our footing for the feat. Again, we come back with book in pocket, and our own children tumbling about as we did before them; now romping with them, and smothering them with the sweet-smelling load—now musing and reading and dozing away the delicious summer evenings. And so shall we not come back to the end, enjoying as grandfathers the lovemaking and the rompings of ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... been of a nervous or timid nature she might have fainted at once. But she was brave and nervy and she struggled hard for her freedom, seeking to cast off the blanket which was smothering her and giving her ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... as if to herself. "How do you know when you are cold, when you are hungry, when you're tired, when you're lonesome? How do you know that you want air when you are smothering? Everything about you tells you, your heart, your mind, your body, your soul. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... lady visitors were not obtuse. They saw they had roused the susceptibilities—prejudices, they called them—of the Lady de Tilly. They rose, and smothering their disappointment under well-bred phrases, took most polite leave of the dignified old lady, who was heartily glad to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... wings; then, getting into bed, lay sighing and tossing. A clock struck three; and seized by an intolerable impatience at her own discomfort, she slipped a motor coat over her night-gown, put on slippers, and stole out into the passage. The house was very still. She crept downstairs, smothering her footsteps. Groping her way through the hall, inhabited by the thin ghosts of would-be light, she slid back the chain of the door, and fled towards the sea. She made no more noise running in the dew, than a bird following the paths ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... for a walk with Tom, sir," he announced half-way to the hall door. Mr. Edwards, smothering a sigh of relief, glanced ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... left on the land. The maximum benefit from clover, when left on the land, can be obtained by clipping it before it is sufficiently heavy to smother the plants, leaving it as a mulch. When the cutter-bar of the mower is tilted upward, the danger of smothering is reduced. Truckers, remote from supplies of manure, have found it profitable to make two such clippings just prior to blossoming stage, securing a third heavy growth. The amount of humus thus obtained is large, and the benefit of the ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... could not see. She felt that she must scream, or die, unless she moved; and she was too afraid to move, and by far too proud to scream! At last she tore herself away from the window and ran to a low divan and lay on it, smothering her face among the cushions. It seemed an hour before the Risaldar came out again, and then he took ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... scene was enacted on December 21 and 22, 1837. A "gag" or "speech-smothering" resolution being then again before the House, Mr. Adams, when his name was called in the taking of the vote, cried out "amidst a perfect war-whoop of 'order:' 'I hold the resolution to be a violation of the Constitution, of the right of petition ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... was sure of its reward, and that no officer who did his duty would now be made a sacrifice, like Admiral Byng, to appease public indignation at ministerial failures. As Nature, languishing in chill vapors and dull smothering fogs, revives at the touch of the sun, so did England spring into fresh life under the kindling influence of one ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Through the greater part of the year they advance very slowly, but when the fierce gales sweep down from the mountains they roll forward so swiftly that any object in their path is quickly buried in their smothering depths. ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... a lot of human kindness under the smothering, stifling cloud of the "System" and behind the iron clank and swishing "cat" strokes of brutality—a lot of soul light in the darkness of our dark past—a page that has long since been closed down—when innocent men and women ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... fell upon their faces and waited. The shells ploughed the ground around them, smothering them with dirt. A horrible, griping pain started in my young friend's stomach, and began creeping upwards. His head and heart both seemed to be shrinking and growing cold. A shot tore off the head of the man ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a stillness like death, so that one could only hear the wheezing and puffing of the victim whom the little brother was smothering against ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... a deathless name! A spirit that the smothering vault shall spurn, And like a steadfast planet mount and burn; And, though its crown of flame Consumed my brain to ashes as it shone, By all the fiery stars I'd bind ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... seven, and still no sound was to be heard. I could wait no longer; I wrapped the child in a shawl, and carried her into the Millars' house, and left her under the care of Mrs. Millar's little servant. And then I ran down, through the thick, smothering fog, to the pier. ...
— Saved at Sea - A Lighthouse Story • Mrs. O.F. Walton
... mind. In his hand he still held the revolver. He pressed it upwards against the thing that was smothering him, and pulled the trigger. Again he pulled it, and again, for it was a self-cocking weapon, and even there deep down in the water he heard the thud of the explosion of the damp-proof copper cartridges. His lungs were bursting, his senses ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... aura of things hostile, made manifest by messengers too refined for the senses to know; and this aura he felt, but knew not how he felt it. His was the feeling as when a cloud passes over the sun. It seemed that between him and life had passed something dark and smothering and menacing; a gloom, as it were, that swallowed up life ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... to me about power, grandeur, and even royalty. Is a prison the fitting place? You wish to make me believe in splendor, and we are lying hidden in night; you boast of glory, and we are smothering our words in the curtains of this miserable bed; you give me glimpses of absolute power, and I hear the step of the jailer in the corridor—that step which, after all, makes you tremble more than it does me. To render me somewhat less incredulous, free me from the Bastille; let me breathe ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... coupes have been packed together so that any movement was entirely impossible; the bride has come like a queen of the orient; she has walked on flowers to the vestibule; there she has passed under an arch of tuberoses; half-way down the aisle a gate of jessamines and smilax has opened with a smothering sense of richness; at the altar she has actually knelt on a pillow of camellias (fifty cents apiece); and a fifty-dollar organist has put on his full instrument, as though he were proclaiming the glory of God most mighty, instead of the folly of man most miserable. Into the church have ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... face of the slothful man's garden. In country places we sometimes come across a ruined house with what was a garden round it, and here and there still springs up a flower seeking for air and light in the midst of a smothering mass of weeds. They needed no kindly gardener's hand to make them grow luxuriantly; can barely put out a pale petal unless cared ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... are able, by smelling at the pocket-handkerchiefs, to tell to which persons they belong ("Reisesk.," p. 39); and lovers at parting exchange pieces of the linen they may be wearing, and during their separation inhale the odor of the beloved being, besides smothering the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... of steaming, sometimes called smothering, is that of cooking meat in a tightly covered jar in a moderate oven for an hour (the moderate heat serves to draw out the juice of the meat), after which the heat is increased, and the meat cooked in its own juices one half hour ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... came, Richard's friends went off for a holiday, but he stuck to his work. The heat of Paris was faint and smothering. On the first Sunday he went out to St. Germain, loveliest of all the Parisian suburbs, and wandered all day in the green and mossy forest. He was lonely and depressed. Not even the cool verdure of the ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... so!" cried Demetrius, grinding his teeth and thumping his fist down on the table. "The lies sown by one single man have produced a deadly weed that is smothering this miserable house! You—to be sure, what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the dark storm swept down upon them, and a million sharp particles of sand beat on them, stinging, smothering, choking them. The horses crowded nearer to the man, and the woman clung tighter to him as he wrapped her more closely in the protecting cloth. He felt suffocated, stifled, his lungs bursting, his throat burning, while every breath he drew was laden with ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... man divined from his contemplation of those features the nature of the woman, all her complexities, and even her emotional fragilities. There came to him the well-known conviction, "It's she that I've always been seeking." At dawn, smothering under his mosquito net, with the din of Arab and Hindu, Masai and Swahili voices drifting in through his shutters, his first ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... drawn to the smothering embrace of that glutinous mass ... for that monstrous appetite.... He tore afresh at the unyielding folds, then knew MacGregor ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... crowd could be heard the sharp staccato click of the telegraph wires. Special trains were coming from Omaha, came the news. The police force had tried to keep the crowds from smothering each other, but they had torn down the gate of the station and rushed through, afraid to ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... praise. We see that God, as soon as he saw that any thing was good, he said so, he uttered it, he declared it, first of the light, and then of other creatures. God would be no author, no example of smothering the due praise of good actions. For surely that man hath no zeal to goodness in himself, that affords no praise ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... looked mellow and beautiful; the Japanese garden was a symphony of green plush sod and brilliant color—the Bougainvillaea almost smothering the little summerhouse and a mocking-bird who must be a grandson of the one of her betrothal night was singing his giddy heart out. Kada was waiting in the doorway, bowing stiffly, sucking in his breath, beaming; the cook just ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the most part earthen floors, trenched to make the smoke fires safe. Some had puncheon floors, with an earthen hearth in the middle, whereupon was placed a furnace of loose brick—that could be kicked over at need, smothering an outbreaking fire. Still others had big cast iron kettles sunk in a sort of well in the floor—with a handy water bucket for quenching fires. Whatever the floor, eternal vigilance was the price of safe bacon—you looked at the smokehouse fires first ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... observe all the proprieties. Then the case of the State against Martin Druce would be called and Druce would not respond to that summons. And so Mary Randall's sensation would die an unnatural death—death from smothering, death from lack of expression. Afterward the tenderloin would resume its old operations. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... it. Most heartily did he curse the untimely hours to which folks keep up their dancing, but he thought that a visit to my house would afford as plausible an excuse for his presence as any other. So he went on, surveyed by the wondering ladies, and by the servants who, smothering smiles, asked one another what brought his Majesty abroad in such a plight (for Rudolf's clothes were soaked and his boots muddy), at such an hour—and that in Strelsau, when all the world thought he was ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... North was so disgusted she didn't do a thing. She made us feel as if we were infants; said she thought smothering in a trunk for an hour was punishment enough for ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... wished the hyena back for company. Holding the rifle above my head, I fired the third cartridge. Then I took the hand of Higgs in my own, for, after all, it was a link—the last link with humanity and the world—and lay down in the company of death that seemed to fall upon me in black and smothering veils. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Trader, our local slave catcher, but I will parley with him and send him away. Thee need not fear. None of thy brethren who have come to us have ever been taken back to bondage.—Good-evening, Friend Trader!" and Josh heard the old Quaker's smooth voice roll on, while he lay back half smothering in a bag, among other bags of corn ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... silence deeper than the last. Even young Archie, smothering himself with a huge slab of bread and butter and caring little about anything else, understood that to be related to a tavern-keeper placed one far beyond the pale of respectability. Annie was looking at her lap now, all her rosiness gone. The young man glanced about him half-puzzled, ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping up against the piano, smothering himself amongst the curtains, wherever she went, there went he! He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had fallen up against him, (as some of them did) on purpose, he would have made a feint ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... ladies were all found dancing and revelling, or in several disports. Whereupon the noblemen yielded Collatinus the victory, and his wife the fame. At that time Sextus Tarquinius being inflamed with Lucrece' beauty, yet smothering his passions for the present, departed with the rest back to the camp; from whence he shortly after privily withdrew himself, and was, according to his estate, royally entertained and lodged by Lucrece at Collatium. ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... I am hot," answered Anne, smothering her anger at this second provocation in being called impudent. "The priest told us to be obedient to those even who are not amiable nor kind; to serve them for God's sake, as ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... any one what I have been through in these days of waiting. I only know it has been like a terrible dream—like those dreams that make the perspiration come out on the forehead with the struggle to wake or cry out or toss the smothering thing from off a body's lungs and heart. And till now, in spite of all, I have been faithful ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... she used always to go through with a form of prayer, but she could not do that now for the something which rose up between her and Heaven, smothering the words upon her lips, and so in this dreadful condition she lived on day after day, growing more, and more desolately and lonely, and wondering sadly if life would always be as dreary and aimless as it was now. And while she pondered thus, Andy prayed on and practiced his lessons in good ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... beside fragments of beams broken and bruised to a powder; it seemed to be as firmly planted there as the breaker itself. Great feathers of foam flew across it, great waves shook themselves thin around it and veiled it in shrouds, and with their every breath the smothering sheets dashed over them,—the two. And constantly the boat drew nearer, as I said; they were almost within hail; Dan saw her hair streaming on the wind; he waited only for the long wave. On it came, that long wave,—oh! I can see it now!—plunging and rearing and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... beams flashing in the opposite direction. He then proceeded to draw the German up towards him as one draws the cork out of the neck of a bottle, to extricate him in spite of his kicks and struggles; while that other hand, set free from the torch, was clapped over his mouth, smothering any sounds of which the under-officer was capable. Not that it was an easy matter to give vent to a shout of alarm in such a position, for Stuart's huge fingers and thumb gripped the German so fiercely and firmly about the neck, just below his jaws, that movement of the latter was impossible, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... statements, showing a sagacity extraordinary in so young a person. She explained her knowledge of figures by the hand-work she had done for the judge, all of whose accounts she had kept. Bob and I saw that she was bent on smothering her memory in that antidote for all ills of heart and soul—work. Her office life was simplicity itself. She spoke to no one except Bob, save in connection with such business matters of the firm's as I might send her by one of the clerks to ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... was the mountain leader's speech; Say ye, who tell the bloody tale, When havoc smote the howling breach, Then did the noble savage quail? No—when through dust, and steel, and flame, Hot streams of blood, and smothering smoke, True as an arrow to its aim, The meteor-flag ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... think on the holy passion of Christ, and be not afraid of death. Behold, answered William, I am not afraid. Then he lifted up his hands to heaven, and said, Lord, Lord, Lord, receive my spirit and casting down his head again into the smothering smoke, he yielded up his life for the truth, sealing it with his blood to the praise ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... and swaying and smothering, like a foolishly fond mother, its first-born land with repeated caresses; while I was drinking in the sunlight with the whole of my being, quivering under the blue sky with the unreasoning rapture of the new-born, holding fast and ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... wicked what is ne'er so just. And yet I can supplant her false surmise. Lust is a fire that for an hour or twain Giveth a scorching blaze and then he dies; Love a continual furnace doth maintain. A furnace! Well, this a furnace may be called; For it burns inward, yields a smothering flame, Sighs which, like boiled lead's smoking vapour, scald. I sigh apace at echo of sighs' name. Long have I served; no short blaze is my love. Hid joys there are that ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... heavier girl than Nan. Strong as the latter was, and well developed from her athletic training, the older girl would have been a heavy charge for Nan at best. Now, with the smoke half smothering her, and Pearl a dead weight in her arms, Nan could scarcely drag her burden to the opening ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... translate the speech to the colonel. Carg reported that it was translated verbatim. Then the general sat back and squinted at his companion, who seemed fairly bewildered by the threat. Patsy caught the young officer smothering a smile, but neither of them interrupted the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... 'No, no; don't let's stop. Keep on still. If we stop your mother will separate us, and I have still so many things to say to you—so many things, so many things. Swear to me that you will be my wife.' 'Yes, I swear it; but enough, enough—' I was smothering. He heard nothing. He was going, going like a madman. We had become a hurricane, a whirlwind, a cyclone. We caused surprise and fright. No one danced any more, but looked at us. And he held me so close, and his face was so near my face, his ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... he hated with the snakelike hate of little men, but shrewdly perceiving that the girl held more than a friendly regard for him, enthusiastically sang his praises in her ears; praises that, somehow, always left her with a strange smothering sensation about the heart and a dull resentment of the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping up against the piano, smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went, there went he. He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch any body else. If you had fallen up against him, as some of them did, and stood there; ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... charity and benevolence should by no means be confined exclusively within the pale of the order. This crowded world, with its eager millions, maddened with ambition's unquenchable fires, trampling under foot and well-nigh smothering each other in the great rush of competitive strife, is full of poor unfortunates, daily appealing ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... freezing. Thus one would go up the little ladder, stick his head through the door a moment for a breath of fresh air, then drop back and allow another the pleasure of a fresh breathing spell. So we alternated between freezing and smothering all the way, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles or more. I had read of the tortures of the "middle passage" and the packing of the slave ships, but I do not think it could ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... suffering. There are those who warring against desire are still influenced by desire; who whilst possessed of body, act as though they had none; who put away from themselves all sources of true merit—briefly will I recount their sorrowful lot. Like smothering a raging fire, though carefully put out, yet a spark left, so in their abstraction, still the germ of 'I,' the source of great sorrow still surviving, perpetuates the suffering caused by lust, and the evil consequences ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... church, where they had been for many years, stood monuments of the two Slav apostles, SS. Cyril and Methodus. St. Methodus was the wise administrator of these two—but even if he takes the rulers of the eastern Adriatic under his particular protection one must be prepared for them to fail in smothering, by their enlightened rule, the discontent which in the last three years has grown among the Yugoslavs to such acute proportions. It began, as we have noted, under the aegis of Baron Sonnino; the old ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the leather began to blaze. With swift presence of mind Dave stepped his right foot on the flame, smothering it at once. ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... during which I eschewed all my habits of which conventional morality disapproved, save masturbation, and felt no small satisfaction with my moral conditions. I became a first-rate Pharisee. Toward the women who had figured in my day dreams I suddenly conceived the chastest affection, resolutely smothering every sensual thought and fancy when thinking of them, and putting in place of these elements ideal love, self-sacrifice, knightly devotion—Sunday-school Garden-of-Eden pictures with a mediaeval, romantic coloring. These day-dreams were always sexual, involving situations ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... armature. A thunderbolt seemed to explode in our faces. All in that room, we as well as the Orconites, reeled dazedly back. A stench of seared flesh and short circuited wires smote our nostrils. Darkness—smothering, thick, absolute darkness—settled ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... moment the tramp of their feet and the clang of their arms were heard in the streets of the town. Windows and doors flew open and with cries and tears of joy and thankfulness, wives, children, and aged parents gathered about them almost smothering ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... regretfully, as the poor little gills opened and shut in vain efforts to breathe the smothering air, and the pretty silver colouring deadened as its life went. 'I am very sorry,' she said, folding her hands together; 'I think I ought not to have killed it only to amuse myself.' And she walked away to where her ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... man, whose name was Roulet, of his own accord stated that he had fallen upon the lad and had killed him by smothering him, and that he had been prevented from devouring the body completely by the arrival of men ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... She knew that she was on the verge of betrayal. She could not stem the tide of Ida May's venom. The latter must make the revelation which had threatened ever since she had come to Wreckers' Head. There was no way of longer smothering the truth. ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... made her feel drowsy. She seemed to be intoxicating herself with this stench of humanity as she sat on the edge of a stool, bending far over, smiling vaguely, her eyes slightly misty. It was as if her laziness was started by a kind of smothering caused by the dirty clothes which poisoned the air in the shop. Just as she was shaking out a child's dirty diaper, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... stirred an indescribable sympathy with something he divined in these two that was akin to himself, but that as yet he could not name. On the surface he felt an emotion he knew not whether to call uneasiness or surprise, but crowding past it, half smothering it, rose this other more profound emotion. Something enormously winning in the atmosphere of father and son called to him in the silence: it was significant, oddly buried; not yet had it emerged enough to be confessed and labeled. But each had ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... shoulder, living on the game brought down by his own marksmanship, or what he could obtain in the lodges of the red men or the cabins of the pioneers. He slept in the woods, freezing by the lonely campfire, or sweltering in the smothering ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... never clearly remembered. He had a dim and uneasy memory of the lapse of time, either great or little, the confused recollection of waking to his senses and fighting his way free from a smothering weight of wet and clinging clothes. As he struggled to his feet a stab of pain shot through his left hand, and up through his forearm. It was so keen and penetrating that he surmised, in his blank and unreasoning ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... perfume herself till the foul contact of Wheeler Street was utterly eradicated, and her wonted purity restored. And I do not blame her. I only wish that she would bring a little soap and water and perfumery into Wheeler Street next time she comes; for some people there may be smothering in the filth which they abhor as much as she, but from which they cannot, like ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... had their heads shaved, were conducted to the Chateau-Guillard, where they were most ingeniously persecuted. When the husband of Marguerite ascended the throne, in 1315, as Louis le Hutin, or the Quarreller, he disposed of his unworthy spouse by smothering her between two mattresses, or, according to the local legend, strangling her with her own ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... rehearsed this scene to himself! He had pictured himself flinging himself with a glad cry into the arms of his father, and that father gathering him to his breast and smothering him with kisses. How different was reality to fancy! He was too dazed by the suddenness of the discovery to do more than stare stupidly up at his father, who drew him gently to him and kissed him on ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below to meet the sun above; for every seed above to reach the ground below; soon again the barren will be the fertile, the desert blossom as the rose. It is so with the human mind. ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... this bold bawdril, who had in some way gained an ascendancy over her—perhaps appointed by Stebbins to act in the double capacity of spy and guardian? Notwithstanding the horrid imaginings to which the woman's presence had given rise, I succeeded in smothering my wrath, and remaining silent. My good star was guiding me; and soon after I was rewarded ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... say nothing to you and Minna when you were with her before the doctor arrived?" questioned Miss Kiametia, smothering ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... Hegel, the philosopher; Charles Kingsley and Canon Farrar, the divines. We must have a care, we peace advocates, how we treat such men's opinions. If they are right; if, as they maintain, war develops a nation, then we are fighting against the instrument of our own salvation and smothering the only hope ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... is well known; in no other way can action be had so thorough, speedy, and prompt. Captain Maxwell[11] tells us it was formerly the custom among the Irish peasantry of Connaught, when one manifested unmistakable evidences of hydrophobia, to procure the death of the unfortunate by smothering between two feather beds. In one instance, after undergoing this treatment, the supposed corpse was seen, to the horror and surprise of all who witnessed it, to crawl from between the bolsters, when he was found to be entirely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... is on her way, crowded with its dying victims; new cargoes are being added in mid-ocean a small crew of slaveholders, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained, is by "the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity," without any "outbreak." As if the sentiments ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... strangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds. I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder—rootless, leafless, parasitic—reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off and smothering the plants which gave it life. A week or two it flourishes and then most of it perishes miserably. So many of us come to be like that: so much of our civilization is like that. Men and women there are—the pity of it—who, eating plentifully, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... to him that he was smothering, and he felt along the side of his face as he had done in youth when they had put a cap on him that was too large. Twining green things, moist with earth-blood, crept over his fingers, the hot, impatient leaves pressed in, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... know that it is all my fault," cried Mary, with the brine almost smothering her tears, as she flung her arms around his neck; "but I never will do it again, my darling. And I never will run away and let you drown. Oh, if I only had a knife! I can not even cast your bridle off; the tongue has stuck fast, and my hands are cramped. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... The spring is hinder'd by your smothering host; For neither rain can fall upon the earth, Nor sun reflex his virtuous beams thereon, The ground is ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... was upon the field. The lines of forest were long purple shadows. One cloud lay along the western sky partly smothering the red. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... broken whispers came tardily to Courthope's understanding through the smothering door. The handle of the door was on a level with the hands that were bound to his sides; he turned himself in order to bring ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... moment. This utterly defeated, already annihilated and prostrate Germany had yet the power to fling troops toward the Tyrol, and had not the revolution overwhelmed all Germany like a conflagration, smothering the war itself, I am not sure but that the Tyrol might at the last moment have been harried by war. And, gentlemen, I have more to say. The experiment of separate peace would not only have involved us in a civil ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... a cozy one. Outside the wind shrieked angrily and swirled the snow in smothering clouds around the tilt, and rattled the stovepipe, threatening to shake it down. It was very pleasant to be out of it all in the snug, warm shack with the stove crackling contentedly and the place filled with the mingled odours of the steaming ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... exceller ailleurs! this is the universal password of the second-rate. In addition, then, to the rarity of true merit and the difficulty it has in being understood and recognized, there is the envy of thousands to be reckoned with, all of them bent on suppressing, nay, on smothering it altogether. No one is taken for what he is, but for what others make of him; and this is the handle used by mediocrity to keep down distinction, by not letting it come up as long as that ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Smothering an impulse to give chase, the adventurer swung alertly into the narrow passage and opened the door to Stateroom 29. The room was dark, but as he fumbled for the switch, the door in the forward partition was thrust open and the girl's slight ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... smothering me! It is not my fault. It was the gentleman there, who hired my boat for a sail. I, I would not make ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... anatomical defects of his production, the old sculptor had succeeded in making it ghastly beyond measure. How much mischief has been wrought upon us by this invariable gloom of the Gothic imagination; flinging itself like a death-scented pall over our conceptions of the future state, smothering our hopes, hiding our sky, and inducing dismal efforts to raise the harvest of immortality out of what is most opposite to ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... attention was paid to them. They were merely looked upon as inconvenient annoyances, interrupting traffic and prejudicial to health, but I doubt if anyone thought it possible for a fog to become one vast smothering mattress pressed down upon a whole metropolis, extinguishing life as if the city suffered from hopeless hydrophobia. I have read that victims bitten by mad dogs were formerly put out of their sufferings in that way, although I doubt much if such things ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... near the ominous half-circle they made, a cushion from the lounge, stained horribly with what I then thought to be blood, but which I afterwards found to be wine. Vengeance spoke in those ropes and in the carefully spread-out cards, and murder in the smothering pillow. The vengeance of one who had watched her corroding influence eat the life out of my honour and whose love for our little Roger was such that any deed which ensured his continued presence in the home appeared ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... never woke till the morning. Mrs. Porson lay beside him, yielding him, stout as she was, a good half of the little Italian bed. She scarcely slept for excitement and fear of smothering him. ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... pictures sold. He has enough to tapestry Trafalgar Square. He has painted, since he came back to England, "The Flaying of Marsyas," "The Smothering of the Little Boys in the Tower," "A Plague Scene during the Great Pestilence," "Ugolino on the Seventh Day after he was deprived of Victuals," &c. For although these pictures have great merit, and the writhings of Marsyas, the convulsions of the little prince, the look of agony of St. ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was occupied in showing the sincerity of their conversion by inventing honors for their new master, and smothering him with distinctions since they had failed to defeat him in the field. Few recruits had yet joined them, and they were still substantially the old body. They voted Caesar the name of Liberator. They struck ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... completely. 'Douglas,' I said, 'I can stand it no longer! It is not only the tragedy of my blind child—it's that you have driven me to hate you. You have crushed all the life and joy and youth out of me! You've been to me like a terrible black cloud, constantly pressing down on me, smothering me. You stalk around me like a grim, sepulchral figure, closing me up in the circle of your narrow ideas. But now I can endure it no longer. I was a proud, high-spirited girl, you've made of me a colourless social automaton, ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... condition are removed from the fire and allowed to cool, when they are ready for use. Those which the artists intend to color black are allowed to remain and another application of fuel, finely pulverized, is made, completely covering and smothering the fire. This produces a dense, dark smoke, a portion of which is absorbed by the baking vessels and gives them the desired black color. It is in this manner that the black ware of these eastern pueblos ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... Sunday-school to be endured, but he did not regard this as altogether odious. It was not so smothering. The atmosphere was less strained. One's personality could come a bit to the front without incurring penalties, and one met one's own kind on a social plane—subject to discipline, it was true, but still mildly enjoyable. It was his custom to linger here until the classes gathered, ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... breathed. Both waited. And it seemed to both that the water was slow in coming aboard. But the water came. It came slowly, perhaps—but surely. It rose to Bagg's shoulders—to his chin—it seemed to be about to cover his mouth and nostrils. Bagg already had a stifled sensation—a frantic fear of smothering; a wish to breathe deep. But he did not stir; he ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... Mr Quilp put his hat on and took himself off, and Mrs Quilp, who was afflicted beyond measure by the recollection of the part she had just acted, shut herself up in her chamber, and smothering her head in the bed-clothes bemoaned her fault more bitterly than many less tender-hearted persons would have mourned a much greater offence; for, in the majority of cases, conscience is an elastic and very flexible article, which will bear a deal of stretching and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... are illimitable. Everything is possible in it, even salvation. The issue may be found, though it be invisible. How the child, wrapped in a smothering winding-sheet of snow, lost on a narrow elevation between two jaws of an abyss, managed to cross the isthmus is what he could not himself have explained. He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... always smothering in its effect on me—close draperies to the windows, heavy curtains around the bed—and I closed the door and lighted my candle with a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... close about the trunks. The shade had dwindled to the breadth of a mere line. The sun was everywhere. The heat exhaling from brick and plaster and metal met the heat that steadily descended blanketwise and smothering, from the pale, scorched sky. Only the lizards—they lived in chinks of the crumbling adobe and in interstices of the sidewalk—remained without, motionless, as if stuffed, their eyes closed to mere slits, basking, stupefied with heat. At long intervals the prolonged drone of an insect ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... free, then? A flash of fire, which subsided quickly under the smothering truth. What if she were free? He could not ask her to be his wife. Not because of last night's madness. That no longer troubled him. She was the sort who would understand, if he told her. She had a soul ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath |
