"Blind alley" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blind alley; but in the end the duke yielded. His heart was set on carrying through this scheme for regaining his duchess. His mind was so rarely guilty of ingenuity that he could not bear to discourage it. They set themselves, therefore, to making ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... Sainte-Croix was in the rue des Bernardins, and the place near at hand where he was to wait for Belleguise was the room he leased from the widow Brunet, in the blind alley out of the Place Maubert. It was in this room and at the apothecary Glazer's that Sainte-Croix made his experiments; but in accordance with poetical justice, the manipulation of the poisons proved fatal to the workers themselves. The apothecary fell ill and died; Martin was attacked by ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... shop by a party of zouaves who had obtained possession of a small cask of brandy; one was already lying senseless in the gutter, while the other two tried to get away, but were too stupid and dazed to move. Loubet and Chouteau had nudged each other with the elbow and disappeared down a blind alley in pursuit of a fat woman with a loaf of bread, so that all who remained with the lieutenant were Pache and Lapoulle, with some ten ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... notoriously a profane and godless creature; a blind alley of Nature, so to speak, a mistake of which she is ashamed, and which she does not permit to reproduce itself. The thirty mules under Hal's charge had been brought up in an environment calculated to foster the worst tendencies of their natures. He soon made the discovery that the "colic" of his predecessor ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... stranger, I was sitting in the carriage, which stood waiting for the conclusion of the ceremony, in the road outside. I had attended early Mass, and arranged to drive home with my people. A number of boys were playing marbles outside the church-yard wall, in a blind alley. The vestry door opened and Father O'Dwyer came out, clad in his soutane and carrying the well-known whip. He crouched and crept along the wall, out through the gate and to the entrance of the alley. The boys were so intent upon their game that they never noticed his approach until he was close ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... a dark, inappropriate building, gloomy and cobwebby, smothered in dust and obscurity; so out of the way, indeed, that it was difficult to find, and our guide was obliged to inquire where the institution was! The traveler may conscientiously omit a visit to the blind alley which contains the Museum of Antiquities at Cordova. The guide, by the way, we found much more intent upon selling us Spanish lace than anxious to impart desirable local information. To be a good guide, as Izaak Walton ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... turned his gharry and was driving back. Then, for a man afflicted with varicose veins the Babu displayed amazing agility. He ran through the silent and deserted street until he came to a turning. The lane which ran into the main road was a blind alley. Mean hovels and shuttered booths flanked it, but at the end a tall house stood. The Babu looked about him and perceived a cart standing in the lane. He advanced to it and ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... place of departure," suggested Jackson. "Evidently the wood-lot is a blind alley. The car goes in, but it can come out only just at this point, or, at least, ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... "centre") of which we have no plan and about which we know nothing. The first rule is this: If a maze has no parts of its hedges detached from the rest, then if we always keep in touch with the hedge with the right hand (or always touch it with the left), going down to the stop in every blind alley and coming back on the other side, we shall pass through every part of the maze and make our exit where we went in. Therefore we must at one time or another enter the centre, and every alley will be ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... luxuriously furnished. There were rugs for the wooden floors and pictures and mirrors for the walls; and in each of them there was the jolliest little stove with a removable lid. We discovered one of these underground palaces at the end of a blind alley leading off from the main trench. It was at least fifteen feet underground, with two stairways leading down to it, so that if escape was cut off in one direction, it was still possible to get out on the other side. We immediately took possession, ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... wants to persuade us in his little book that at the present time Art has entered upon its final phase, that it is in a blind alley, from which it ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... and narrow got me to, I'd like to know? Sometimes I think it's nothing but a blind alley ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... whole, Skirrl's behavior in connection with this problem appears to indicate a low order of intelligence. He persisted in such stupid acts as that of turning, after emergence from the right box, toward the right and passing into the blind alley I, instead of toward the left, through G and H, to D. In contrast with the other animals, he spent much time before the closed doors of the boxes, instead of going directly to the open doors, some one of which marked the box in which the reward of food could be obtained. It is, moreover, obvious ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... thought he could lose himself in the crowd, but by the aid of the street lights, Randy kept him in sight. He passed along for two blocks and then turned into a side street and then into a blind alley. ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... handle the sign warned her that it would be useless. She frowned: no one could keep up the spirit of a royal home-coming under these disadvantages. Suddenly her eyes brightened, she tossed her head, and following what was apparently a little blind alley of shrubbery, she plunged into a tangle of undergrowth and disappeared. Only her bicycle, resting against the fence, showed that some one had passed that way. Working herself through the screen of leaves, she emerged into a fairly cleared ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... undignified poverty for which all her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was the only escape. It is another picture of the old conflict illustrated in the persons of Ann Veronica and Marjorie Trafford; the constant inability that our conditions impose on the desire to love beautifully. ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... and text-books used in our religious schools, and articles in encyclopedias meant for the enlightenment of the general public. The view of Judaism that one gets in this manner is not only a distorted one, but it has the effect of bringing all further reflection to a standstill. It lands one in a blind alley. The conclusion which a person generally arrives at when he consults these sources for information about the Jewish religion is that, whatever else Judaism might be, it certainly offers no field for the exercise of deep insight or broad vision. This largely accounts for the manifest ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... allee, a walk), a narrow passageway between two buildings available only for foot passengers or hand-carts, sometimes entered only at one end and known as a "blind alley,'' or cul-de-sac. The name is also given to the long narrow enclosures where bowls or ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... knowledge in potentia. To invert the order is to destroy Philosophy not to serve it, is, indeed, a mere counsel of desperation. An intuitive Philosophy so- called finds itself sooner or later, generally sooner, in a blind alley. Practically, it gives rise to all kinds of crude and wasteful effort. It is not an accident that Georges Sorel in his Reflexions sur la Violence takes his "philosophy" from Bergson or, at least, leans on him. There are intuitions and intuitions, as every ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... were Rainey did not bother himself with. That it meant the fooling of the whole crew he did not doubt. He intended eventually to gather all the gold. And the girl—she would be in his power. But perhaps she wanted to be? Rainey got out of his blind alley of thought and started into the main cabin to give ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... good purpose that they discovered, at the rear of the building, opening into a blind alley, a narrow wooden stairway. It was ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the higher end lies below the level of the Rue de Bondy; at the lower it falls away towards the Rue des Mathurins du Temple. Follow its course and you find that it terminates in another slum running at right angles to the first—the Cite Bordin is, in fact, a T-shaped blind alley. Its two streets thus arranged contain some thirty houses, six or seven stories high; and every story, and every room in every story, is a workshop and a warehouse for goods of every sort and description, for this wart upon the face of Paris is a miniature ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... my shoulders. It was the same blind alley in which my thoughts had strayed upon the train ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... and ran, and ran, and ran. She ran up Fore Street, and down High Street, and through the Market-place, and down to the left, and over the bridge, and up the blind alley, and back again, and round by the Castle, and so along by the Haberdasher's on the right, opposite the lamp-post, and round the square, and she came—she came to the EXECUTION PLACE, where she saw Bulbo laying ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... made me out of conceit with the world—with that part of the world that had become my world. I wanted to get up into hers—and I could not see any way. The room in which Fox sat seemed to be hopelessly off the road—to be hopelessly off any road to any place; to be the end of a blind alley. One day I might hope to occupy such a room—in my shirt-sleeves, like Fox. But that was not the end of my career—not the end that I ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... before us, prevented us from estimating the length of the gallery; and I was beginning to think it must be endless, when suddenly at six o'clock a wall very unexpectedly stood before us. Right or left, top or bottom, there was no road farther; we were at the end of a blind alley. "Very well, it's all right!" cried my uncle, "now, at any rate, we shall know what we are about. We are not in Saknussemm's road, and all we have to do is to go back. Let us take a night's rest, and in three days we shall get to the fork in the road." "Yes," said I, "if we have ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... so fast!" said Carew, haughtily, drawing himself up, with his hand on his poniard; "dost mean to tell me that I have lied to thee? Marry, sir, thy tongue will run thee into a blind alley! I told thee that the boy could sing, but not that he could ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... like in the magnetic circuit. We can approach that condition, however, by breaking the circuit very quickly with a condenser of limited capacity around the break. This is done in the Ruhmkorff coil primary; the condenser forms a sort of blind alley for the extra current on its beginning to flow out of the primary coil. But the condenser charges and backs up and stops the discharge from the primary, even giving a reverse current. The lines of magnetic force collapse, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... good ones," she retorted. And then: "Would you like to have your quo warranto blind alley turned ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... close to the ground and followed along the path. At the entrance to the little gallery of the broken column it diverged, one part leading into the gallery, and the other into a sort of blind alley at one side. ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... on his horse, until he had extricated himself completely from this suspicious neighborhood. He then observed, that it reminded him of a similar blind alley in Malta, infamous on account of the many assassinations that had taken place there; concerning one of which, he related a long and tragical story, that lasted until we reached Catania. It involved various circumstances of a wild and supernatural ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... was a rather large garden, which ended in a little grove of lime-trees, neglected and overgrown. In the middle of this thicket stood an old summer-house in the Chinese style: a wooden paling separated the garden from a blind alley. Liza would sometimes walk, for hours together, alone in this garden. Kirilla Matveitch was aware of this, and forbade her being disturbed or followed; let her grief wear itself out, he said. When she could not be found indoors, they had only to ring a bell ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... is a blind alley? You can't find your way to liberty that way. You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that have made social ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... use in the human body. Vestigial organs are sometimes pressed into a secondary use when their original function has been lost. The danger of this appendage in the human body to-day is due to the fact that it is a blind alley leading off the alimentary canal, and has a very narrow opening. In the ape the opening is larger, and, significantly enough, it is still larger in the human foetus. When we examine some of the lower mammals we discover ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe |
