"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say, they appeared to be deprived of the power to reason. In five minutes the mouth of the crevice was completely choked with bodies, some, who were merely wounded, struggling and squirming to extricate themselves from the bloody tangle. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... the whole civilized world, has to deal, is the problem which has for one side the betterment of social conditions, moral and physical, in large cities, and for another side the effort to deal with that tangle of far-reaching questions which we group together when we speak of "labor." The chief factor in the success of each man—wage-worker, farmer, and capitalist alike—must ever be the sum total of his own individual qualities and abilities. Second only to this comes the power of acting in combination ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... escort was moving, the mules crowding on behind our halted column; so presently we were slipping, sliding, floundering down the hillside, now on steep slopes, which made one a bit nervous to ride along; now waiting for the axemen to clear away the tangle of trees crushed to earth by the burden of some year of excessive snow; now on the horses, now off, through marsh and thicket. I ask myself if I could ride that ride to-day: it seems to me as if I could not. One ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... problem of his next step. To each of them life had a new and terrible significance. From a calm sea it had changed to wind-rent chaos. It was revealing its potentialities,—lamb-like when asleep, lion-like when roused. Tangle-haired Tragedy had stalked forth into the midst of men going ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... road and entered the thicket on the other side. Now the river sounded below him, and he decided that he must be close to the edge of an embankment. He crept forward slowly on his hands and knees through the tangle of branches, feeling the ground before him. One hand went off into space, and he groped about. Then he drew back and waited for another moment of moonlight to show him his position. When it came, a few minutes later, he saw the Tennessee, swollen ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... One of God's precious gifts is the luminous hour that denies the lower animal mood. Mind is not always at its best. Full oft our thought is sodden and dull. Then duty seems a maze without a clew and life's skeins all a tangle. The mind is uneasy, confused and troubled. Then men live to the eye and the ear and physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in them; for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories and large ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... gathered up the embyro robe of the Princess and moved off, a bewildering tangle of silver spangles and floating lace, drawn over the skirt of one of Mrs. Whitney's white ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... was to the boy, and as he regarded the complicated web, he found himself wondering how much of all this tangle was known to the men, and whether they were always fair to their employer. He had frequently overheard conversations at his father's when they had proclaimed how easy and care-free a life the rich led, and while they had envied and criticized and slandered the Fernalds and asserted ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... at last to the marshy bottom of the valley, where the wet and tussocky grass was set in a tangle of blackberry bushes and bracken higher than a man. A few forlorn tufts of cotton-grass still blew out in the languid breeze and the yellow stars of the cinquefoil shone from the moss, but disfigured by the dozens of evil-looking ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... rich man's hurrying terror, and the slow foot hope of the poor, Yea, the voiceless wrath of the wretched and their unlearned discontent, We must give it voice and wisdom, till the waiting tide be spent Come then since all things call us, the living and the dead, And o'er the weltering tangle ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... died some months ago and left me some property, and it was in connection with that matter that I came to Clintonia. This is the county seat, you know, and I wanted to consult the records in the office of the County Clerk. There seems to be a terrible tangle about the whole thing. Perhaps it was because I became so nervous over the matter that things went ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... at her feet, the hurrying stream rested an instant, to take breath, in a deep, dusky little pool, overhung by a tangle of eglantine. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... our talk had filled his eyes with lay (I seemed to see or feel) that other mood all the time, the mood which had caused the girl behind the counter to say to me that he was "anxious about something." The unhappy youth, I was gradually to learn, was much more than that—he was in a tangle of anxieties. He talked to me as a sick man turns in bed from pain; the pain goes on, but the pillow ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... jets the flame! Men fall from their saddles like plums from trees; Horses take fright, reins tangle and bind; "Steady—Dismount—form—and into the wood" They go, but find what scarce can please: Their steeds have been tied in the field behind, And Mosby's men are ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... that you care for me. I know how much I care for you, and how much this effort is costing me. We were too late. No other course in honor presents itself. God knows how eagerly and hopelessly I have sought a way out of this tangle of duty." ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... Nancy saw the bushes stir a few rods in front of her, and raised her gun into position, still hiding in the tangle. Albert discovered a movement in front of him, and he took ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... off to the mail on the tug that towed the schooner out of the tangle of shipping. We made sail in half an hour and the Sea Spell made a good leg to windward, beginning her voyage into the south—a voyage on which I was following the beckoning finger ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... whenever possible—I think she only once married her,—yet still the creature remained immortal in Mrs. Gustus's public personality. She concealed or transformed everything that did not seem artistic. Her notebook was a tangle of self-deceptions. The rest of the Family knew this. They never pretended to ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... eastward, to see if any more of the land in that direction could be made out than the unfavourable position of the ice would permit at our last visit. The Fury then made sail and stood to the eastward, encountering the usual strength of tide off the southwest point of Tangle Island, and soon after a great quantity of heavy drift-ice, apparently not ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... haunted her for the next week and made an undercurrent of soreness in her soul, which was externally being harrowed up by the near approach of the Red Cross concert and the worries connected therewith. The Reese cold had not developed into whooping-cough, so that tangle was straightened out. But other things were hanging in the balance; and on the very day before the concert came a regretful letter from Mrs. Channing saying that she could not come to sing. Her son, who was in Kingsport with his regiment, was seriously ill with pneumonia, ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... shown in his letters, was greatly impressed by the magnitude of the prize and by the defenceless condition of his capture. He alleged these as the motives for staying in person at St. Eustatius, to settle the complicated tangle of neutral and belligerent rights in the property involved, and to provide against the enemy's again possessing himself of a place now so equipped for transactions harmful to Great Britain. The storehouses and conveniences provided for the particular traffic, if not properly guarded, ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... still delayed, and the delegates of the Cotton States sat sullenly through a tangle of routine voting. Finally, the question was renewed on Butler's proposition to adopt the Cincinnati platform pure and simple. This was the red flag to the mad bull. Mississippi declared that the Cincinnati platform was a great political swindle on one half the States ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... tree-trunks, all of which "bled," giving out a milky sap; and then again the sign failed. About them were the trees in endless columns, overhead was the roof of leaves, and on the ground was a tangle of undergrowth and decaying vegetation, that gave out a moist earthy smell, which set the lungs labouring for oxygen. The boys were uncomfortable. Their skins were clammy, their eyes were heavy, and their limbs languid. Mr. Hume was glad ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... sun, when it shone, was larger and fiercer than he had ever seen it, but it shone only for an instant. Blankets of cloud and fog hid it from view. Rain fell incessantly. Lush, rank vegetation covered the ground and rose in a tangle far overhead. The Jovians emerged from the space ship, the prisoners in their midst. A huge lizard, a hundred feet long, rushed at them but a flash of the disintegrating tubes dissolved it into dancing motes of light. The Jovians made their way through ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... said Nicholas, hesitatingly,—"thank you,"—at a loss what pertinent reply to make, and in despair of clearing himself from the tangle in which he had become involved. It was plain, too, that he should get no satisfaction here, at least upon the search in which he was engaged. But the reply seemed quite satisfactory to the old gentleman, who cheerfully relinquished ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... that the sea is cleansed when agitated by the winds it throws up tangle and seaweed; but the intemperate and bitter and vain words, which the mind throws up when the soul is agitated, defile the speakers of them first of all and fill them with infamy, as always having those thoughts within their bosom and being defiled with them, but only giving vent ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... be comforted and taken up out of the bleak harsh disappointments and stresses of her customary life. At times after Sir Isaac had either been too unloving or too loving, or when the girls or the matrons had achieved some new tangle of mutual unreasonableness, or when her faith failed, she would lie in the darkness of her own room with her soul crying out for—how can one put it?—the touch of other soul-stuff. And perhaps it was the constant drift of Mr. Brumley's ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... symbolized the subtile principle which pares away the natural virtue of man, and substitutes an artificial polish, which is hypocrisy. It is to be observed, however, that hair can be representative of natural evil as well as of good. A tangle-headed bush-ranger does not win our sympathies. A Mussulman keeps ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... such a frenzy of mind-agony? Nothing! ... less than nothing! This was the everlasting thirst and fire spoken of so vaguely by prophets and preachers,—the thirst and fire of the Soul's unquenchable longing to unravel the dismal tangle of its own bygone deeds, . . the striving forever in vain to steadfastly establish the wavering mystery of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... witching tangle of shadows, and the air was drowsy with spicy, wind-blown scents, as four motor cars swept on their merry ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... which in a calm drop in the water alongside." Piscataqua, however uncouth, most Americans can place; but what shall we say of Ammonoosuc, Wampanoag, and such like, then adorning our lists, which seem as though extracted by a fine-tooth comb drawn through the tangle of Indian nomenclature. Under the succeeding administration Piscataqua was changed to Delaware. The new commander-in-chief was among our most popular officers, distinguished alike for seamanship, courage, and courtesy; but he held to great secrecy as to his intentions, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart," or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... counsel therein. There be tangles of divers sorts, my maid, and those which cut the tightest be not alway the worst. Thou mayest tangle thy feet of soft wool, or rich silk, no less than of rough cord. Ah me! there be tangles here, Amphillis, and hard to undo. There were skilwise fingers to their tying—hard fingers, that thought only to pull them tight, and harried them ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... power; they brought reciprocal accusations of lukewarm zeal; they invented the most treacherous ways of getting rid of a rival. There had been none of this internecine warfare among the Liberals; they were too far from power, too hopelessly out of favor; and Lucien, amid the inextricable tangle of ambitions, had neither the courage to draw sword and cut the knot, or the patience to unravel it. He could not be the Beaumarchais, the Aretino, the Freron of his epoch; he was not made of such stuff; he thought of nothing but his ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... had long ago fallen into disuse, was almost hidden by the thick tangle of undergrowth which ran riot at that corner of the old park. It was partly covered by the shrunken half of a lid, above which a rusty windlass creaked in company with the music of the pines when the wind blew strongly. The full ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... some mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge an innocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the very innocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle of bad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real forces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments; and even when we have come out again ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... at being in church," quoth Master George in lordly wise to his little sisters. "I'm papa." Whereupon he will twist himself into an unseemly tangle of legs and arms which is simply a barbarous travesty of the attitude of studied grace with which you drink in the sermon in the corner of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... exchanged for that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to gauge ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... granda. Tallow sebo. Tally egali, kunegali. Talmud Talmudo. Talon ungego. Tame malsovagxigi, kvietigi. [Error in book: kiretigi] Tame malsovagxa. Tamely kviete. Tamper intrigi, enmiksigxi pri. Tan tani. Tan tanilo. Tan (the skin) brunigi. Tangent tangento. Tangible palpebla. Tangle (entangle) enmiksigi. Tank akvujo. Tankard pokalo, kaliko. Tanner tanisto. Tannin tanino. Tantamount to egalvalora al. Tap bateti, frapeti. Tap krano. Tape kotonrubando. Tape worm solitero. Taper kandeleto. Taper maldikigi. Tapestry, to hang ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... any effort of their own, and have no notion how money is obtained. A whirl of the most fantastic notions took possession of his brain immediately after he had parted with Alyosha two days before, and threw his thoughts into a tangle of confusion. This is how it was he pitched first on a perfectly wild enterprise. And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the most impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... coming back," she said, "if I have to tie binding twine across the road to tangle up Pleurisy's long legs. He's on his way to Cowan's, I know. Ab Cowan has quinsy. Never mind, Thursa, we'll get him. I hope now that the old doctor is too full to come—oh, no I don't either, I just hope he's away and Dr. Clay will have it done ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... young man will bring over a laughing, romping cluster of young women. At his entrance, their girlish clamor sunk to a liquid murmur; and, when he approached, they were nearly silent, all but Julia and a stylish blonde, whom Barton had never seen before. They were gathered around a cloud and tangle of women's mysterious fabrics, whose names are as unknown to men as their uses. Most of the young girls suspended their examinations and rippling comments, and, with a little heightened color, awaited the approach of ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... From the other side life had not departed wholly as yet. Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. The only human being making use of the alley besides the Professor, ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Such is the tangle of conflicting interests in a tooth-and-nail society that people cannot avoid being scabs, are often made so against their desires, and are often unconsciously made so. When several trades in a certain ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... twinkling he swooped up Mike's small coin, which had rattled to the pavement, and vanished with them in a struggling tangle of horse cars and omnibuses before Mike finished his desperate yell ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... over its toys. In the 'Song of Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness of sea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it is green, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word that utters the Trinity.' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing,' says Taliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire and earth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind.' And touches of natural beauty come ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... natural, I own, that one should tremble to essay These perils, dare the lures that there waylay; But from doubt's tangle you must now break free,— Be of good cheer and follow ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... of the C. P. & D. Railway were crowded into a half-dozen utilitarian rooms on the second floor of the company's freight station building in the Chicago yards. In two of these rooms, with a window outlook upon a tangle of switching tracks with their shifting panorama of cars and locomotives, Ford set up his standard as chief executive of the three "annexed" roads, becoming, in the eyes of three separate republics of minor officials and employees, the arbiter ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... buzzed in the ears of the listener at the window like the humming of a swarm of gnats. To understand and remember them was impossible, and she gazed in astonishment at the old man who so clearly comprehended the confused tangle and drew from it so readily just what he needed for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by the roadside, were the dwelling-houses. Some of them were a tangle of rafters mixed up with heaps of brick and miscellaneous rubbish—stoves, pots and pans, chair-legs, pictures, bedding, boxes, and all kinds of household articles. Others had been dispersed around. Others seemed ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... sincerity; Ignacio Chavez would no sooner think of being rude to a beautiful young woman than of crying "Scat!" to an angel. But as to staying here a thousand years . . . she glanced through the tangle of the garden to the tiny ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... of the abdomen and is covered with fine oblique and parallel nervures. The powerful nervures of the dorsal portion of the wing-cover are of the deepest black, and their general effect is that of a complicated design, not unlike a tangle of Arabic caligraphy. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... the cottage he walked carefully, though still swiftly, but when he reached it he paused, bent forward his head, and listened. He was in the tangle of coarse grass that grew right up to the north wall of the cottage, and close to the angle which hid from him the sea-side and the cottage door. At first he heard nothing except the faint murmur of the sea upon the rocks. His stillness now was ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... done," she said haughtily. "Through this meshed tangle of treachery and dishonor there leads but one clean path. That I ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... was a wide, fragrant, shaded place, full of the shrubs and flowers of former days. Huge pink and white oleanders, planted in tubs, stood on either side the walks. Thick spikes of purple lavender edged the beds; the summer-house was a tangle of honey-suckle, rosemary, and eglantine. Roses of all colors abounded. They towered high above Lota's head as she walked,—twined and clasped, shut her in with perfumed shadows, rained showers of many-colored petals on the grass. An old-fashioned fairy would have delighted to ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... wisely cross to the opposite side of the street. To find out what this tangle is, it is not necessary to jump head first ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... a short change of course, and the word Hit explains the meaning of—"Sighted enemy cruiser engaged with destroyers." Another twist follows. "9.30 P.M.—Passed wreckage. Engaged enemy destroyers port beam opposite courses." A long straight line without incident, then a tangle, and—Picked up survivors So-and-So. A stretch over to some ship that they were transferred to, a fresh departure, and another brush with "Single destroyer on parallel course. Hit. 0.7 A.M.—Passed bows enemy cruiser sticking up. 0.18.—Joined flotilla for attack on battleship ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... of pushing him into the front ranks; Mary and Mary's little secret, so unsafe in Trudy's keeping; Beatrice, who did not know quite how many rings she possessed; the whole maddening and really uninteresting tangle—she wondered if she could force Gay to buy her a ring. Should she boldly order such-and-such a stone and pick out a setting and present him with the bill? Why she hesitated she did not know; she was like all her wilful sisters who gaze and sigh, ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... the huge window at his side, and appeared to take counsel of the tangle of chimney pots and telegraph wires that formed the only prospect from that side of the building. He repeated the name once or twice in a mystified manner, at length remembered the difficult task Mrs. Delarayne had asked him to perform ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... came the tread of a returning force—too late!—and in the deepest shades of the jungle a native woman, with horror-stricken face, pressed forward through tangle and thorn, with a living, wailing bundle clasped close to ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the woods, gleeful as boys out of school. The forest is pathless and dense with June undergrowth, shutting out the sun and all sign of direction. The company scatters. Priest Aubry, more used to the cobble pavement of Paris than to the tangle of ferns, grows fatigued and drinks at a fresh-water rill. Going in the direction of his comrades' voices, he suddenly realizes that he has left his sword at the spring. The priest hurries back for the sword, loses his companions' voices, and when he would return, finds that he is hopelessly ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... vine and creeper, were all ablaze with blossoms, for this was the wet season, in which nature runs riot. Great trees of strange character rose out of the tangle, their branches looped with giant cables and burdened with flowering orchids or half hidden beneath other parasites. On every hand a vegetable warfare was in progress—a struggle for existence in which the strong overbore the weak—and every trunk was distorted by the scars of the battle. Birds ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... found they were descending and this gave them heart to plunge ahead more rapidly. The dogs began to trot as the sled overran them; they rushed blindly into gullies, fetching up at the bottom in a tangle, and Johnny followed in a nerveless, stupefied condition. He was dragged like a sack of flour for his legs were limp and he lacked muscular control, but every dash, every fall, every quick descent drove ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... required of him; the new world that is laid before him is the world of art, life liberated from the tangle of cross-purposes, saved from arbitrary distortion. Instead of a continuous, endless scene, in which the eye is caught in a thousand directions at once, with nothing to hold it to a fixed centre, the landscape that opens before the critic is whole and single; it ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... particle of floating seaweed, every dead fish or animal, all vegetation, etc., which chanced to wash into that fence-tangle, stayed there. It is easier for matter, as well as for man, to get entangled in mangrove roots than ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... took off the dress that she was wearing and put on some horrible old rags belonging to a beggar, all torn and covered with mud. After that she smeared mud all over her hands and face, and shook her hair into a great tangle. Having thus changed her appearance, she went about offering herself as a goose-girl or shepherdess. But the farmers' wives would have nothing to say to such a dirty maiden, and sent her away with a morsel of ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... characteristic feature of the jungle was its thorniness. The shrubs were thorny; the creepers were thorny; the bamboos even were thorny. Everything grew zigzag and jagged, and in an inextricable tangle, so that to get through the bush with gun or net or even spectacles, was generally not to be done, and insect-catching in such localities was out of the question. It was in such places that the Pittas often lurked, and when shot it became ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... by his publishers in all his contracts, because his method of work raised this item to an unreasonable sum. For one of his short stories, Pierette, Balzac demanded no less than seventeen successive revised proofs. And his corrections, his additions and his suppressions formed such an inextricable tangle that the typesetters refused to work more than an hour at a time ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... truth that I could get out of a tangle of confused details. All through another day I watched the business of battle—a strange, mysterious thing in which one fails to find any controlling brain. Regiments came out of the trenches and wandered back, caked with clay, haggard for lack of sleep, with a glint of hunger ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... a rather curious tangle, as Primrose Henry was to learn afterward. Philemon Henry was older than his brother James, and in trade in the city that William Penn had planned and founded in an orderly manner. And though it is the common belief that Philadelphia ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... well to remember that for the whole of sexual conduct there is quite conceivably no general simple rule. It is quite possible that, as Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illuminating "Nature of Man," we are dealing with an irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We have passions that do not insist upon their physiological end, desires that may be prematurely vivid in childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old needs of the ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the man, emotions that jar with physical impulses, inexplicable ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... full sight were five Grizzly Bears, an old one and four cubs. "Run for the woods," growled the Mother Grizzly, for she knew that men carried guns. Not that she feared for herself; but the idea of such things among her darlings was too horrible to think of. She set off to guide them to the timber-tangle on the Lower Piney. But an ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... long since passed and still no sound of movement from the rows of tangled sleeping MEN. Tangle! They were lying in all directions and at every angle; it was impossible to define whose feet were whose or what had become of the chest and head of a pair of long legs leading from a jumbled heap. Duport had his feet fast in the heel of someone untraceable further than the knee—the first-named ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... about clumsily on the other tack and heeled over so that her port side was deep in the water, which afforded us good protection from the island. We kept close watch on the edge of the jungle, but nothing menaced us, although the tangle of brush and creepers might have been full of men and we ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... laboratory of unusual size in which Randall found himself, one in which every variety of physical and electrical apparatus seemed represented. Three huge dynamo-motor arrangements took up the room's far end, and from them a tangle of wiring led through square black condensers and transformers to a battery of great tubes. Most remarkable, though, was the object ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... enormous bulk, as large as polar bears, and when the salmon are spawning in the upper waters of the coast rivers, they become so fat they can hardly move. Certainly I have never been in a country where bear signs were so plentiful. The wood was an almost impassable tangle of vines and undergrowth, and the thought of really finding ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... her to escape from him to rabbits (figurative) and the simpler life. There, however, she fell in with Rollo, who loved her at sight, and whose daughter, Hyacinth, adored her father, but quite blandly deceived him about her own amorous adventures. A pretty tangle, you observe, and I am not sure that I can wholly acquit the author of some cowardice in her manner of cutting it. But undoubtedly Autumn remains a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... down and cried in that patient, helpless, miserable way of hers. She didn't know just what she was crying for, herself or the children. Life was a hopeless, unmanageable tangle that seemed to give her nothing and take her all. So Mrs. Sears sat and cried. It was ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Artaban spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers and fruit-trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all colour was lost in the soft and odorous darkness of the late September night, and all sounds were hushed in the deep charm ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... matter? The great lady who advised and patronised him no doubt had been there. If she had not been able to smooth out the tangle, what chance would his despised ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... creditors. It expresses regret for their losses, and promises, if his life is spared, and fortune favors him, to do all in his power to make them good. No one doubts Mr. Fielding's integrity, and regrets are expressed that he did not remain in the city and help unravel the tangle in which his affairs are involved. He is a man of ability, and as he is still in the prime of life, it may be that he will be able to redeem his promises and pay his debts in full, if sufficient ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... with seeming aimlessness. Heavily barbed it was, and bad stuff to get caught in. One of the great reasons for the preliminary bombardment that usually precedes an attack is to cut this wire. If charging men are caught in a bad tangle of wire they can be wiped out by machine gun-fire ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... of nowhere, Shadow flashed in like a lightning bolt on the other Tough as he had almost reached Happy. There was a brief, squalling tangle and the Tough pitched headlong into ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... itself. "Justice" and "Law" are the specious names it employs to cloak its own arbitrary will; they have no objective validity, no reference to the well-being of all; and it is only the weak and the foolish on whom they impose. Strong and original natures sweep away this tangle of words, assert themselves in defiance of false shame, and claim the right divine that is theirs by nature, to rule at their will by virtue of their strength. "Each government," says Thrasymachus in the Republic, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... confused tangle of ropes I was compelled to traverse, yet none greatly interfered with my progress, except to render it slower, and the consequent strain harder upon the arms. The huge foremast, close against which ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... story of this tangle, of the bewilderment and dismay for all alike, and the increasing despair of the unemployed, this chronicle has but indirectly to do. Trafalgar Square was emptied at last by means already familiar to all. Beggars skulked ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... the means of connecting things as I find them with the life of this Brassfield. I must take with me the bridge which spans the chasm between Brassfield and Amidon—I mean our friend Clara. Without her, I shall never go back. I haven't the nerve. I should soon find myself in a tangle of mistakes from which I could never extricate myself—I've thought it all out. The Cretan Labyrinth would be like going home from ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... Census Inspector and I have to go to 'Frisco to straighten out a Chinese tangle over the census there. The Chinese refused point-blank to have anything to do with the census, and there was a heap ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... blasted barren scrub country we plunged into the lush jungle. It was not a very wide jungle, but it was sufficient. The trees were large and variegated, reaching to a high and spacious upper story above the ground tangle. From the massive limbs hung vines, festooned and looped like great serpents. Through this upper corridor flitted birds of bright hue or striking variegation. We did not know many of them by name, nor did we desire to; but were content with the impression of vivid flashing ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... think you have reduced me to silence because you have interrupted me. Ah! there, you have tangled my hair. How provoking you are! It will take me an hour to put it right. You are not satisfied with being a prodigy of impiety, but you must also tangle my hair. Come, hold out your hands and take this ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... long sword of an ancient samurai at his side, a modern revolver at his hip, and bore in his brawny hand the heavy war spear of a head-hunter. Long black hair, and a huge beard covered the man's head and face, but clean gray eyes shone from out of the tangle, and a broad grin ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... quaintly-shaped rocks, some drenched with the fulness of the glorious bath, others catching now and again a sprinkling shower. On each side of the river the sea, clear to its depths where alternate sand and rock made a tangle of capriciously mingled light and shade; its surface, here blue as the still waters of the Grotta Azzurra, there green as the olive, here again red-brown as Carthaginian marble, lay waveless, as with ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... when she had made the first appeal to his chivalry when he had met her, a chubby little scrap of only three scant summers, wandering off down the Pike, every little footfall taking her farther and farther away from the Farm, and she had raised her eyes, brimming over with tears in their wonderful tangle of black lashes, and said, with a tiny catch in her voice, "I'm losted. Tate me home, Boy!"; and he, with the superior knowledge of location which seven years gives over three, had led her safely back to Miss Eliza—ever since that long-past ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... shoulder to shoulder for so many years, who had thus arraigned her? Her instant of inaction past, she darted down the corridor after Mary. But the latter passed into the study hall before she could overtake her. She could do nothing now to straighten the tangle in which they had so suddenly become involved until the morning session of school was over. She glanced anxiously toward Mary's seat the moment she stepped across the threshold of the study hall, only to see her friend ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... vehemently assured Vincent would be sure to burn, and was a real English medicine, imported with great trouble and expense, and certain to cure the ailment from which he was suffering. How Vincent would have got out of the tangle, or convinced the chemist's assistant that he was not in need of medical aid, is uncertain, but at that moment Irene, who was walking with Lorna in the square, spied him through the window, and brought ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... and Jesus hold converse, and all His joy passes into His servant's heart. I saw, not long since, in a wood a mass of blue wild hyacinths, that looked like a little bit of heaven dropped down upon earth. You and I may have such a tiny bit of heaven itself lying amidst all the tangle of our daily lives, if only we put our trust in Christ, and so get into our hearts some little portion of that joy that is unspeakable, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... I said, "for the next carnage will not only stop, but come over;" and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with "Miss Faith" and "Miss Mehitable" carved upon them, and into the leafy shadow of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... movement is more clearly understood by appreciating the successive points of view which its thinkers and statesmen have occupied than by following the devious turnings of political events and the tangle of party controversy. The point of view naturally affects the whole method of handling problems, whether speculative or practical, and to the historian it serves as a centre around which ideas and policies that perhaps differ, and even conflict with one ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... ancient broken sun-dial, which was in these days in the midst of a sort of thicket, where a bold tangle of the finest red roses clambered, and, defying neglect, flaunted their rich colour ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... tangle, after five hours at sea, and many more in the berth in the cabin; but Vera was able to sit up in a dainty dressing-gown, and submit to treatment not quite that of a hairdresser, but made as lively as could be by little jokes and kindly apologies at any extra hard pull ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... came to a spring freshet which they had crossed this morning King turned off to the right, riding up-stream, his horse's hoofs splashing mightily in the water. Gloria, looking on ahead, saw only rock-bound canon walls on either hand and a tangle of ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... the Hedgehog With his sleepy eyes looked at him, Shot his shining quills, like arrows, Saying with a drowsy murmur, Through the tangle of his whiskers, "Take my ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... her large windows, she found herself overlooking part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... road; but it was in a nearly impenetrable thicket of chaparral, where young oaks had grown up so high that their tops made, as it were, a second stratum of thicket. Alessandro had never ridden through it; he had come up on foot once from the other side, and, forcing his way through the tangle had found, to his surprise, that he was near the highway. It was from this canon that he had brought the ferns which it had so delighted Ramona to arrange for the decoration of the chapel. The place was filled with them, growing almost in tropical luxuriance; but ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... would bring spectators, and those I most particularly didn't want. Still, I could not see any means of getting the weapon into my own hands without its going off. It was impossible to "rush" him. The dozen yards which separated us was one solid tangle of scrub-bushes interwoven with brambles. It would have taken at least forty seconds to tear through them, and in that time he could most assuredly snap off all six chambers, however big a duffer he might be. This would bring up some of ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... arose on straightened legs and his muzzle dropped in the outstretched palm. A wind slightly perfumed with the odour of melting snow and unsheathing buds swept the lake beside them, and lifted a waving tangle of light hair on the brow of the man, while a level ray of the setting sun flashed across the water and illumined the graven, sensitive face, now alive with keen interest ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... murder of Phillips, the death of Crone, might prove to be the outcome of some vulgar encounter between them and desperadoes who had subsequently scuttled to safety and were doubtless quaking near at hand, in fear of their misdeeds coming to light; what appeared to be a perfect tangle might be the simplest matter in the world. So I judged—and next morning there came news that seemed to indicate that matters were going to be explained on the lines which Sir ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... presumption to raise my gun against any of the inhabitants of this spot where man seemed so mean, so strangely out of place. Once I paused to cut back with my knife the creepers that hid in inextricable tangle a solitary and exquisitely carved archway. But the archway led nowhere, its god and temple alike had perished, and already the plants have begun their tireless ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to strike quick and hard when the moment came, after an hour of casting. Half the time you would not see your fish at all, but only hear the savage plunge as he swirled down with your fly. At other times, as you struck sharply at the plunge, your fly would come back to you, or tangle itself up in unseen snags; and far out, where the verge of the firelight rippled away into the darkness, you would see a sharp wave-wedge shooting away, which told you that your trout was only a musquash. Swimming quietly by, he had seen you and your fire, and slapped his tail down hard ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered, unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... invoking the saints of heaven, and imploring her in their name—she who was so wise and strong—to discover some way out of this tangle in which his ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... a woodsman's house Has sunk in wild dilapidation; There buried under vines and boughs I often sit in contemplation. So dense the tangle that the day Through heavy lashes can but glimmer; The rocky cleft is rendered dimmer ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various |
