"Labyrinthine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Labyrinthine, wonderful. From Ddalus, a famous Athenian architect, who designed the labyrinth at Crete in which the Minotaur ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... and boundless as the woods upon the Himalaya's brow, Nor ever may the struggling floods rush headlong to the earth below. Opening, egress was not there, amid those winding, long meanders. Within that labyrinthine hair, for many an ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... rights, and their duties, down to such minute carefulness as that they may not smoke on duty "except when engaged in peculiarly dirty and offensive labor," are here, as in all official matters in Germany, outlined in labyrinthine detail. Sickness, death, accident, are all provided for with a pension, and there are also certain gifts of money for long service. The police and the street-cleaning department co-operate to enforce the law, where private companies or the city-owned street-railways ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... their obscure and mysterious recesses. They may have ended in the cour des miracles for all we knew—it was nearly fifty years ago—and they may be quite virtuous abodes of poverty to-day; but they seemed to us then strange, labyrinthine abysses of crime and secret dens of infamy, where dreadful deeds were done in the dead of long winter nights. Evidently, to us in those days, whoever should lose himself there would never see daylight again; so we loved to visit them ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... many languages, was no doubt intelligible only in broad outline to the masses, and sometimes, when it percolated through the labyrinthine maze of such minds as that of the worthy Bishop of Mende, it appeared overwrought, full of contradictions, and of double meanings. It seems then as if the symbolist were splitting a hair with embroidery scissors. But, in spite of the extravagance ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes, I sped; And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace, ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... Christian quarter dirty, and the Jewish simply filthy. I often had to gallop through the last-named holding my handkerchief to my mouth, and the kawwasses running as though they had been pursued by devils. Everywhere in Damascus, but especially in this quarter, the labyrinthine streets are piled with heaps of offal, wild dogs are gorged with carrion, and dead dogs are lying about. One must never judge Damascus, however by externals: every house has a mean aspect in the way of entrance and approach. This is done purposely to deceive the Government, and ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... through gloomy and labyrinthine passages, which conducted to a different range of cellars from those entered by the unfortunate Favart, Gawtrey emerged at the foot of a flight of stairs, which, dark, narrow, and in many places broken, had been probably appropriated ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... produced by causes which alter the tension of the labyrinthine fluid, such, for example, as the pressure of wax upon the tympanic membrane, or exudation into the middle ear or into the labyrinth. Giddiness occurring in the course of chronic middle-ear suppuration may be significant of labyrinthine or of intra-cranial mischief, but is not necessarily ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... in a winter toward the latter part of the last century, a party of Shawnee Indians crossed from the Kentucky cane-brakes into Ohio. Penetrating its deep, labyrinthine forests, they came upon a double cabin, where dwelt two widows, with several children. These they inhumanly massacred, and burnt their dwellings to the ground. Then, laden with their plunder, they set out on ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... with limestone masses. There had been no frost nor rain to disturb the original rock-piling. Only the agencies of sand and wind had disarranged the distribution on which the builders of the earliest dynasty had looked. And this was weird, mysterious and labyrinthine. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... entrance pylon were buried to a depth of 40 feet, while inside the building the level of the native village was 50 feet above the original pavement. Seven months ago the first court contained not only the local mosque, but a labyrinthine maze of mud structures, numbering some thirty dwellings, and eighty strawsheds, besides yards, stables, and pigeon-towers, the whole being intersected by innumerable lanes and passages. Two large mansions—real mansions, spacious and, in Arab fashion, luxurious,—blocked the great Colonnade ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... long, gently rising slope separated the fugitives from that labyrinthine network of wildly carved rock. But it was the clear air that made the distance seem short. Mile after mile the mustangs climbed, and when they were perhaps half-way across that last slope to the rocks the first horse of the pursuers mounted to the level behind. In a few moments the whole band ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty campi, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall deserted—during these ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... this he dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... have not said just what they would like to say; there is always a subtle, lurking something still unexpressed, which something is the real essence of the matter, and which your penetration is expected to divine. In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone to do, they write what I ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... reappearance, she and the sculptor were straying together through the streets of Rome. Being deep in talk, it so happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico, and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon. It stands almost at the central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in search of other objects. Hilda, looking up, proposed that they ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lights shone behind several of the small windows in the facade of the huge labyrinthine building. Without any hesitation de Batz turned down the Rue du Temple, and soon found himself in front of the main gates which gave on the courtyard beyond. The sentinel challenged him, but he had the pass-word, and explained that ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... attraction for her or for the schoolroom; but "diamond mines" sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening. Lavinia was very spiteful about ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Slone climbed to a cedared plateau that rose for a whole day's travel, and then split into a labyrinthine maze of canyons. There were trees, grass, water. It was a high country, cool and wild, like the uplands he had left. For days he camped on Wildfire's trail, always relentlessly driving him, always ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Dayton sparkled as he paused in his recital, running his fingers through his hair, and for a time evidently wandering in the labyrinthine walks of the soul's mathematics, whose beautifully defined laws might make all things straight, and it was only the sight of John's towering form in the doorway that roused him, ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... points will, without doubt, eventually receive more ample treatment at the hands of some future historian, Mr. Miller has performed a most useful service in affording a guide by the aid of which the historical student can find his way through the labyrinthine maze of Balkan politics. He begins his story about the time when Napoleon had appeared like a comet in the political firmament, and by his erratic movements had caused all the statesmen of Europe to diverge ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... moral,—that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless we behold them in the sphere and circumstances to which they are specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit of only a few yards. It seemed to me a sad emblem of the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes go astray, petty in scope, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... friend, with fitting thoughts inspired; By a dread parting was thy fame acquired, Thy mournful destiny we sorrow'd o'er, For weal and woe thou left'st us evermore, And then again the passions' wavering force Drew us along in labyrinthine course; And we, consumed by constant misery, At length must part—and parting is to die! How moving is it, when the minstrel sings, To 'scape the death that separation brings! Oh grant, some god, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... that I was one of the party, but the sophisticated Massachusetts rabbit has always been too clever for me. But it is not so difficult to follow the tracks, confusing as they sometimes are in their labyrinthine route, to their end for the forenoon. This is usually a snuggery under some brush or in a tangle of dried grasses and ferns. Here I fancy the rabbit backing in and crowding out a sitting room and then sitting in it. He will stay in this "form" until you fairly kick ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... and deserted street. It wound its tortuous way at first on the crest of the hill, skirting the majestic temple of Magna Mater with its elevated portico and noble steps that lost themselves in the shadows of labyrinthine colonnades. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy |
