"Babel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will hold us and a dozen more loads like us." "Impossible!" say some. "You'll see," say the initiated; and as soon as you get out you do see, and hear, too, what seems like a general breaking loose from the Tower of Babel, amid a perfect hail-storm of trunks, boxes, valises, carpet-bags, and every describable and indescribable form of what a ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... interval is employed in discussing the news, and execrating paper money. But when once the door is opened, a scene takes place which bids defiance to language, and calls for the pencil of a Hogarth. Babel was, I dare say, comparatively to this, a place of retreat and silence. Clamours, revilings, contentions, tearing of hair, and breaking of heads, generally conclude the business; and, after the loss of half a day's time, some part of their clothes, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... eyes, intelligent countenances, dark-olive, or, I should rather say, copper complexions and coarse black hair, but not woolly like the negroes. They appeared to be talking continually. In the forecastle there was a complete Babel. Their language is extremely guttural, and not pleasant at first, but improves as you hear it more, and is said to have great capacity. They use a good deal of gesticulation, and are exceedingly animated, saying with their might what their tongues find to say. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the talk at Babel's Tower This interchange of tedious chat! War can be made in half-an-hour And why should Peace take more than that? All this procrastination, worst of crimes, Annoys the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... magic. It was taught by the Angels named in the text; for which offence they are still supposed to be confined to the ancient Babel. There they may yet be consulted, though they are rarely ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... all. He made the world to see; He touched the blind eyes of the people, as they groped in superstition, and has given them sight; He has made the ages, once limping and halting, to arise and march forward with magnificent tread; He found the world a babel of jarring voices and fretting purposes, and His touch gave peace and singleness of purpose until men could discern that "through the ages one unceasing purpose runs." He did for man and mind what was first done for ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... courage, Pollyanna ascended the chapel steps, pushed open the door and entered the vestibule. A soft babel of feminine chatter and laughter came from the main room. Hesitating only a brief moment Pollyanna pushed open ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... ever ye had either; whilst the laws and language o' England are at this time universal! ay, sir, universal, or at least mair sae than any one tongue ever yet was since the Lord made men strangers to their fellows at the confounding o' Babel." ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... those manifold and weary grievances to which I had listened. The foul weather was passed, and the landlocked sea-birds would be out on the foam once more. The rhythm of "God Save the King" swelled through the babel, and I heard the old lines sung in a way that made you forget their bad rhymes and their bald sentiments. I trust that you will never hear them so sung, with tears upon rugged cheeks, and catchings of the breath ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... full force of the old skipper's quarter-deck voice, had the effect of completely upsetting the already tense nerves of the majority in the circle. Two or three of the women began to cry. Chairs were overturned. There was a babel of cries and confusion. The light ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... came from distant buildings, a babel of howls and shrieks, inhuman, unearthly. There were no phrases or syllables, but to Blake it was familiar ... somewhere he had heard it ... and then he remembered the radio and the weird wailing note that told of communication. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... shadowy bulks and the soft gurgle of water at their prows were detected by the Spaniards, whose attention until that moment had been all on the other side. And now there arose on the night air such a sound of human baffled fury as may have resounded about Babel at the confusion of tongues. To heighten that confusion, and to scatter disorder among the Spanish soldiery, the Elizabeth emptied her larboard guns into the fort as she was swept past on the ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... encore, Ivan rose, in the midst of a little babel of "Bis!" and, taking the virtuoso of the world by the arm, led him to the piano. Well repaid, it seemed, in that moment, for the disappointment he had lately had to endure. For every face about him was alive with ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... There was a babel of voices when they came up of desperate men who had a bitterest enemy in their clutch; and some shouted, 'Club him', 'Shoot him', 'Hang him', while others were for throwing him over the cliff. Then someone saw under the flap of his waistcoat that same silver-hafted pistol that lay so lately ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... in the restaurant were taken—and over them floated the continuous noise of knives upon plates and a motley babel, galloping in waves. It smelt of rich and pungent kitchen fumes. In the middle of the restaurant, upon a stand, Roumanians in red frocks were playing; all swarthy, white-toothed, with the faces of whiskered, pomaded apes, with their hair licked down. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... of Baal, or Baalbek, is between the desert and the deep sea. It lies at the foot of Anti-Libanus, in the sunny plains of Coele-Syria, a day's march from either Damascus or Beirut. It is a city with a past as romantic as Rome's, as wicked as Babel's; its ruins testify both to its glory and its shame. It is a city with a future as brilliant as any New-World city; the railroad at its gate, the modern agricultural implements in its fields, and the porcelain bath-tubs in its hotels, can ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the shores of the Persian Gulf. In each of these districts we have a sort of tetrarchy, or special pre-eminence of four cities, such as appears to be indicated by the words—"The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar." The southern tetrarchy is composed of the four cities, Ur or Hur, Huruk, Nipur, and Larsa or Larancha, which are probably identified with the Scriptural "Ur of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... most of them about to perish, went up a babel of sounds which in its sum shaped itself to one prolonged scream, such as might proceed from a Titan in his agony. All this beneath a brooding, moonlit sky, and on a sea as smooth as glass. Upon the ship, which now lay upon her side, the siren still sent up its yells for succour, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow Me, if ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to and fro; for there cab and hansom rarely ventured, and from window over window the inhabitants looked forth in pleased contemplation of the scene. Dyson made his way slowly along, mingling with the crowd on the cobblestones, listening to the queer babel of French and German and Italian and English, glancing now and again at the shop windows with their levelled batteries of bottles, and had almost gained the end of the street, when his attention was arrested by a small shop at the corner, a vivid contrast to its neighbours. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... but it did not touch her face. Two or three children were playing about the floor with their toys and a white fox-terrier. The young man was talking very fast, two at least of the ladies were laughing, the children were squabbling and shouting. It was a Babel. As Rupert stood at the door he caught the sense of ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... beneath the deep portal of the palace, and turning to the left, began to mount flight after flight of a staircase, which, for the loftiness of its aspiration, was worthy to be Jacob's ladder, or, at all events, the staircase of the Tower of Babel. The city bustle, which is heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable paving-stones, the hard harsh cries reechoing in the high and narrow streets, grew faint and died away; as the turmoil of the world ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... distance of about two miles, as far as the eye could see from left to right stretched a black and dense forest of unknown antiquity. Behind and beyond it at increasing distances peak upon lofty peak, mountain after mountain, like Babel, reached upward for the sky. Of these the one nearest and directly in front of the knights ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... dear child,' expostulated Lady Willow, 'you can't think in this babel; besides, the police will not allow the hansom to stand here unless one of us is shopping, or has business in ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... tolled mournfully as the old year died. Would that its bitter memories could have perished with it! And then from steeple and steamship, locomotive and factory, a babel of sound burst forth as sirens and bells and whistles welcomed the birth of 1900. Yet, as the shrill greetings died away, one heard the tramp of infantry through the streets. The Capetown Highlanders—a ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... might ponder long over the town of Gratis, unless we thought Bonus promised more. There is Extra, and, if tautologically fond of grandeur, Metropolis City,—a mighty Babel of (in 1850) four hundred and twenty-seven inhabitants,—and Bigger, which has seven hundred. A brisk man would hardly choose Nodaway for his home, nor a haymaker the town of Rain. And of all practical impertinences, what could in this land of novelty equal the calling of one's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... rattles were keeping up their low, threatening din, with one impulse dashed forward to rescue the chief, those on the flanks, far-seeing, held wisely back, even while around the prostrate chief there raged for a brief, hot, furious moment a wild babel of threat and execration, a mad whirl of brandishing knives and pistols and naked red limbs and brawny arms in dusty blue, Hawk and two other stalwart Sioux had thrown themselves between avenging blows and the young white chief, standing afoot now with pale, set face, over his writhing victim. ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... "By Babel's streams we sat and wept When Zion we thought on, In midst thereof we hanged our harps The willow ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... said one to another at Babel,—"Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven," they typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,—a desire for a tangible and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods. In the earlier ages of the world, when humanity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book at random, say at once: "This is the voice of such and such a one." It is no one's manner or voice. It is part of a common babel. ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... afternoon the jury retired to consider their verdict, and as the judges at the same moment withdrew to their chamber, the pent-up feelings of the crowded audience instantly found vent in loud Babel-like expressions and interchange of comments on the charge, and conjectures as to the result. "Waiting for the verdict" is a scene that has often been described and painted. Everyone of course concluded that half-an-hour would in any case elapse before the anxiously ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... acquired great fame in his native city; in medicine he published a treatise on Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood; being an Episcopalian and Jacobite, he wrote severe satires on all things Presbyterian, e. g. "Babel, or the Assembly, a Poem," ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is a humbug. The voters, as voters—not as fathers, brothers or sons—are humbugs. The committees are humbugs. And the speeches to the extent of about ninety per cent are pure buncombe. But, oddly enough, out of the silly babel of talk that accompanies popular government, we get, after all, pretty good government—infinitely better than the government of an autocratic king. Between democracy and despotic kingship lies all the difference between genial humbug and ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... where in some places the Author has been so attentive to his Divinity, that he has neglected his Poetry. The Narration, however, rises very happily on several Occasions, where the Subject is capable of Poetical Ornaments, as particularly in the Confusion which he describes among the Builders of Babel, and in his short Sketch of the Plagues of Egypt. The Storm of Hail and Fire, with the Darkness that overspread the Land for three Days, are described with great Strength. The beautiful Passage which follows, is raised upon ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... wisdom, will beget the strength, purity, virtue, and truth which can alone restore order and beauty upon the earth; that all "systems," and mechanical, outward means and appliances to the end, will but increase the Babel of confusion, as things unfitted to it, and altogether extraneous and hopeless. "Systems!" It is living, truthful men we want; these will make their own systems; and let those who doubt the truth humbly watch and wait until it is manifest to them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the finished packet of Sypher's Cure as it would be delivered to the world. Then there were the packing-sheds full of deal cases for despatching the Cure to the four quarters of the globe, some empty, some being filled, others stacked in readiness for the carriers: a Babel of sounds, of hammering clamps, of creaking barrows, of horses by the open doors rattling their heavy harness and trampling the flagstones with their heavy hoofs; a ceaseless rushing of brawny men in sackcloth aprons, of dusty men with stumps of pencils and note-books and crumpled invoices, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... introduce his "most discreet sister Griselda" as he called her, who came arrayed in all the finery of half a century before, and wearing a mysterious erection on her head, something between a wedding-cake and the Tower of Babel in a picture Bible, while his niece, Miss MacIntyre, a pretty young woman with something of bright wit about her, which came undoubtedly from her uncle's family, was arrayed more in the fashion of ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... outside, a noisy crowd, a babel of loud voices, where the shrill Norman accent was discernible. The villagers formed two ranks, and when the children appeared, each family took possession of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... we became entangled in a medley of soldiers, coachmen, torch-bearers and servants coming and going—such a babel of strange oaths—I wished I were safe again in the quiet of Biloxi. I pleaded with Jerome to turn again, but he ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... bit furiously at his tongue and the pain steadied him. As he swept the table over with a crash and wrenched the chair from her hand (and he took his strength for it) he became aware that the angry excitement behind his back, the threatening babel, had subsided to long-drawn sighs of pity, and realised with a sort of disgusted relief that the blow he had himself suffered from this panting, writhing maenad had somehow changed the situation and that he was an object of horrified sympathy. Mercifully, the room was ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... build the house, they labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe this; and I also believe that, without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel; we shall be divided by our little, partial, local interests, our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... chains, swinging their burdens out over the holds of the vessel taking in its moist cargo. The stevedores were vociferously busy, working against time. For, in the brief open season, time was the very essence of the success demanded for the mills. The noise, the babel of it all was usually the choicest music ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... architect, 'T had been as easy to erect A Louvre, or Escurial, or a tower That might with heaven communication hold, As Babel vainly thought to do of old. He wanted not the skill or power, In the world's fabric those were shown, And the materials were all his own. But well he knew what place would best agree With innocence and with felicity; And we elsewhere still seek for them in vain. If any ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... everybody there present seemed crazy with excitement. How, or by whom, our little party was singled out was beyond my power to guess. But we were recognized in a moment, and in another moment were swept asunder from each other amid such a polyglot babel of voices as I had never heard before. People were laughing and crying and cheering and fighting all at once, and I had a glimpse of the count in the arms of a score of mustachioed, sallow-featured men who were weeping and shouting, and hugging and kissing him and ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... jubilation and war-whoops of triumph. "Cargoes" were being unladen here; Liddell-and-Scott was officiating as a cricket ball there; a siege was going on round this door, and a hand-to-hand scrimmage between the posts of that. A few of the placid ones were quietly unpacking in the midst of the Babel, and one or two were ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... world is one great Babel. All is business, business, and we ask for "some vast wilderness" in which to lie down and ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... have none, wanting to open them as soon as possible with the new comers. What with these and pistol practice and rifle shooting from upper casements across the river, in order to expend spare ammunition, the European quarter was a very Babel all day long, and we were not sorry to escape the turmoil and get under weigh to new ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... teeth met edge to edge, and the little black moustache, to which he often gave an absent upward twist, lent an ironic quality to this chill, gay smile, at times almost Mephistophelian. He sat twisting the moustache now, leaning his head to listen, amidst the babel of voices, to Betty Jardine's chatter, and the thrills of infectious expectancy that passed over the audience like breezes over a corn-field left him unaffected. His observant, indifferent glance had in it something of the schoolboy's barbarian calm and something ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of evolutionistic thought, as laid down in Spencer's interminable volumes, for instance, is given up by reputable biologists the world over. There is pretty much of a Babel among them, when it comes to a definition of evolution. There are dozens of theories,—mutation, orthogenesis, Weismanism, Mendelianism, etc.,— and each has its adherents,—but they agree in one thing, that "Natural Selection" does ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... during his presence, babel broke out anew with his departure. Some one, standing on a sofa, caught up Otway's last word ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... could have been avoided or not I do not know. Whether our education was at fault, or whether materialism had made us blind—these things I cannot tell you. I only know that this war found us potentially a nation, but actually a babel of tongues. Without philosophy and humanitarianism this nation could not go to war—and in those two things ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... had seen that stony page of feudal history, and Vernon had to be informed what manner of building it was, his sole idea of a tower being Babel, which he had often tried to reproduce with his wooden bricks, with no happier result than was obtained in the original attempt. So another Hansom was chartered, and they all went off to the Tower, Vernon sitting between them, perky and loquacious, and intensely curious about ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... appeared to dispute the scene with us, to break the magic of the moonlight, and to puncture the vast silence of the desert with their cooings and gurglings and chatterings in German, English, Arabic, and every other language known since the Tower of Babel. Arab guides lit up the Sphinx with flaring magnesium, an impertinence that should have made hideous with hate the insulted features, but instead turned them for a thrilling instant of suspense into marble. Indeed, none of our ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Chaldea, which is a great kingdom, having a language peculiar to itself, and I passed beside the Tower of Babel. The men of this country have their hair nicely braided and trimmed, like the women of Italy, wearing turbans richly ornamented with gold and pearls, and are a fine looking people: but the women ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... lads and maidens, with a few stalwart basses and tenors. It was often a curious performance. Everybody sang as loud as he could bawl; cheeks and elbows were at their utmost efforts, the bassoon vying with the clarionet, the goose-stop of the clarionet with the bassoon—it was Babel with the addition of the beasts. And they were all so proud of their performance. It was the only part of the service during which no one could sleep, said one of them with pride—and he was right. No one could sleep through the terrible din. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... to the hilltop. The officer spoke a few words in a quiet tone to the boys who were at the summit, and instantly every sled stopped. Not so the tongues. Babel broke loose. Some went off in silence; others crowded about the officer, expostulating, cajoling, grumbling. It was "the first snow;" they "always slid on that hill;" "it did not hurt ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... a certain distance, after which it was allowed to escape by the sacrificers. As I was watching, with all my hopes enlisted on its side, the efforts of an antelope to escape, I heard a roar which was horrible even in that babel of ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... the title of leader of the State, was one who had not even sprung from the second strata of Roman society, but had struggled with a poverty which would have condemned an ordinary man to devote such leisure as he could spare for politics to swelling the babel of the Forum and the streets. It is true that Marcus Aemilius Scaurus bore a patrician name, and was one of those potential kings who, once in the senate, might assume the royal foot-gear and continue ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... columns of Acre—but vaster and of that same fineness of workmanship: and such broideries of golden thread and great pearls for draperies and altar-cloths, as one may scarce dream of! And in their market-places, strewn with the spoils of the East are faces and voices of every clime and a very babel of tongues; more—far more than on our own Rialto; with schools for every language. And I saw a thing in Nikosia that in all my journeyings I ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... little temper; startling measures for public safety were offered and state secrets openly discussed in this curbstone congress; while a rank growth of newspaper correspondents, with "the very latest," swelled the hum into a veritable Babel. And the most incomprehensible of all was the diametric opposition of men from the same neighborhood, in their views of the same subject. Often it would be a vital one, of doctrine, or of policy; and yet these neighbors would antagonize more bitterly than ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... pedagogue," and contained an amusing account of a house where the Puritan element was still in the ascendant. A numerous company is present, and each little group being occupied with its own subject, the general effect is that of another Babel. While one is engaged in quoting the classics, another confides to his neighbors how much he ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the kindly hint, and Jessie and myself were soon fast asleep in spite of the din close beside us. It was Saturday night, and the store was full; but the Babel-like sounds disturbed us not, and we neither ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... of black magic to him; it seemed so hideously alive in its deadness, and its doings were so absurd and mysterious. "Silence, silence!" commanded the white papers in one vast chamber, and, in another, babel existed! And then that terrible mute dining-room, with the high, unscalable mantelpieces that no midget could ever reach! He kept uttering the most dreadful judgments on the club and on Mr. Oxford, in quite audible tones, oblivious of the street. He was aroused by a rather ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... with the world and yet to be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in the places where men toil is not that God is denied with a vociferous atheism; it is that He is ignored by an unvoiced indifference. It is not the babel of the market-place that men need to fear; it is its silence. If we say that we live only as we love, that we are strong only as we are pure, that we are successful only as we become just and good, the world into which we go forth does not deny these ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... Masenius and Milton little episodes, trifling digressions which are absolutely alike; both speak of Xerxes who covered the sea with his ships. Both speak in the same tone of the Tower of Babel; both give the same description of luxury, of ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... shelf-lip, over the head of him; gave him no hand to kiss; and left poor Philip kneeling there. An awkward position indeed;—which any German Painter that there were, might make a Picture of, I have sometimes thought. Picture of some real meaning, more or less,—if for symbolic. Towers of Babel, medieval mythologies, and extensive smearings of that kind, he could find leisure!—Philip having knelt a reasonable time, and finding there was no help for it, rose in the dread silence (some say, with too sturdy an expression of countenance); and retired from ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... the clearing and proceeded to the place where the giants still stood among the trees. Hundreds of monkeys, apes, baboons and orangoutangs had gathered round, and their wild chatter could be heard a mile away. But the Gray Ape soon hushed the babel of sounds, and the Wizard lost no time in breaking the enchantments. First one and then another giant soldier disappeared and became an ordinary monkey again, and the six were shortly returned to their friends in ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... by, and the babel of tongues increased, it might have been noticed that both the brothers stole anxious glances at the door. Every time it opened they invariably turned to see who the arrival was. There must have been ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... her credit for certain good qualities which are commonly coexistent with worldliness,—especially in a woman. There was a spice of something better latent amid her shrewdness and hard-headed sagacity; the echo of more generous aspirations lingered through all the noise of this earth's Babel in her heart. And so, when she heard of Everett's resolve to pay his father's debts by parting with the property, her better and higher nature warmed to the young man; and though she protested against his Quixotism, and frowned, and talked of prudence, and so forth, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... hacked to short lengths and piled on all sides. The workers, as Jerry watched, dropped their implements to race toward him. There was a press of flat, white faces above. His captors, in their copper armor, beat the newcomers back. The babel ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... edged with rabbit fur) that I might see all the fun. This one fell, and that one fell, and a third was knocked over and a fourth got a bloody nose: and so on; and there was such a noise and din, as would have deaved the workmen of Babel—when, lo! and behold! the ball played bounce mostly at my feet, and the whole mob after it. I thought I should have been dung to pieces; so I pressed myself back with all my might, and through went ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... babel of sound—a shout, the scuffle and tramp of unsteady feet, noise of chairs pushed aside and overturned on the bare boards, servants running to and fro. And Colonel Stewart, with clammy brow and failing limbs, sat silent in his chair, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... soul, Wears a false seeming of the pearly stain Where worlds beyond the world their mingling rays Blend in soft white,—a cloud that, born of earth, Would cheat the soul that looks for light from heaven? Must every coral-insect leave his sign On each poor grain he lent to build the reef, As Babel's builders stamped their sunburnt clay, Or deem his patient service all in vain? What if another sit beneath the shade Of the broad elm I planted by the way, —What if another heed the beacon light I set upon the rock that wrecked ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... catamaran raced at once for the launch; a Babel of strange oaths jarred the brooding silence; alarm, almost panic, stirred men's hearts and bubbled forth in wild speech. Under pressure of this new peril the instinct of self-preservation burst the bonds of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... intelligible, by the last unintelligible, to our fellows. It has not seldom occurred to me (noting how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... while to stop and examine them. About sixty miles in a south-easterly direction from Mexico is the modern town of Cholula. This has grown at the expense of the ancient city of Cholula, grouped around the famous pyramid of that name. This was the Mexican "Tower of Babel." The traditions in regard to it smack so strongly of outside influence that but little reliance can be placed on them. They are evidently a mixture of native traditions and Biblical stories. Like Teotihuacan and Tulla, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... was received with a chorus of derision by those to whom it was addressed, and the noise was increased so furiously, that it resembled the clamor of Babel. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... doorway and stood looking for the list of names such as are set at the foot of the stairs leading to flats in London. There was no such list. From a lighted doorway on the right came a babel of shrill, high-pitched voices. Betty looked in at the door and the ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... every shape, dresses of every color, in groups outside the bathing huts, in long rows by the margin of the waves, or scattered here and there, really looked like immense bouquets on a vast meadow. And the Babel of sounds—voices near and far ringing thin in the light atmosphere, shouts and cries of children being bathed, clear laughter of women—all made a pleasant, continuous din, mingling with the unheeding breeze, and breathed with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the sorrow shall be forgotten. We are very confident in the Lord, that you will be faithful to Jesus Christ, in the work committed to you by him in all his ordinances, and taking neither foundation, corner stone, nor any part of the rubbish of Babel to build the City that is called, The Lord is there: But measuring all with the golden reed of the Sanctuary, you may more closely be united to the best Reformed Kirks, in Doctrine, Worship, and Government, ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... She had a wild desire to get down out of the carriage and run with all her might away from this hateful scene. The sky seemed to have suddenly clouded over and the hum and buzz of voices about seemed a babel that would ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... green instead of the normal white and pink. They were dressed in dark short tunics, and kept talking to each other in a tongue quite unintelligible to Norman and Hackett. They came closer, flocking curiously around the two men, with a babel of voices quite meaningless to the two. Then one of the men uttered ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... is it? Ay, a' ken fine aboot the toor o' Siloam, and aboot the toor o' Babel as weel; an' a've read, too, about the blaspheemious Herod, an' sic like. Man, but he's a hot-heided laddie, and ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... unfriendly to Mr. M'Culloch, or to any writer whatever, I should not have offered it indirectly, but openly, frankly, and in the spirit of liberal candor due to an honorable contemporary.] At this very day, a French and an English economist have reared a Babel of far more elaborate errors on this subject; M. Say, I mean, and Mr. Malthus: both ingenious writers, both eminently illogical,—especially the latter, with whose "confusion worse confounded" on the subject of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... may conveniently begin with these also in their process of development—in fact, our method compels us to this course. We enter then a school; and if we bring fresh eyes we may soon be agreed that the extraordinary babel of studies its time-table and curriculum reveal, is intelligible from no single one of the various [Page: 112] geographic or historic points of view we have traversed from mountain to sea, or from past to present. But this unprecedented conflict of studies becomes ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... proclaimed by a beating drum, the noisy parade of fire-men, the clanging of bells, and all the hullaballoo that panic and curiosity could make. But last year, in Berlin, looking at houses like the tower of Babel, I said something of fire, and was told that no one felt nervous nowadays, the arrangements for dealing ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... of Babylonian topography, opinion has been divided on the question before us, and there have not been wanting persons to maintain that the Birs-i-Nimrud is the true temple of Belus, if not also the actual tower of Babel, whose erection led to the confusion of tongues and general dispersion of the sons ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... female beauty in the Park, and the Allee Verte was thronged with superb horses and brilliant equipages. The tables d'hote resounded with a confusion of tongues which might have rivalled the Tower of Babel, and the shops actually glittered with showy toys hung out to tempt money from the pockets of the English, whom the Flemings seemed to consider as walking bags of gold. Balls and plays, routs and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... heaven in proof of their innocence. Dogs, cats, cockatoes swinging on their perches, peacocks, parrots, pelicans, and every one of the cocks swarmed from the barnyards and garden and cellars, to add their shrill cries and shrieks to the universal babel. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... at anything that folks like we can understand," the carter continued, by way of passing the time. "On'y foreign tongues used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two families spoke alike. They read that sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk will whir. 'Tis all learning there—nothing but learning, except religion. And that's learning too, for I never could understand it. Yes, 'tis a serious-minded place. Not but there's ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... wing of the house and a stable on one side of it, and a coach-house and another stable on the other. The garden and the garden wall were at the end. From the yard the wall ran up to a good height—to the children it seemed immense, as high as the tower of Babel, though were they to go back now and look at it I dare say they would find it quite insignificant, for walls have a curious way of decreasing an inch or two with ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... finally presented itself he drove the arrow straight to its mark. As the gaily plumaged creature fluttered to earth its companions and the little monkeys set up a most terrific chorus of wails and screaming protests. The whole forest became suddenly a babel of hoarse screams ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... early days of Upper Canada. Sixty years have passed over the Province since the notable gathering, and all who were then present have paid the debt of nature. Hushed now as are their voices, the Macleod breakfast-room, on the morning we have indicated, was a perfect babel of noise. The solemn pageant of the previous day, and the sacred griefs of those whom the grim Enemy had made desolate, seemed at the moment to have been forgotten by the departing throng; and for a time the young master of Pine Towers, as he bade adieu to his father's guests, witnessed ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... had no business in a bedroom. It was, indeed, used as a storehouse for such wares as the proprietor of the shop only offered to a chosen few. The atmosphere of the room must have been a very Tower of Babel, where strange foreign bacilli from all parts of the world rose up and wrangled in ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... merriment and wonder—everything was new and extraordinary to them. The sea, the ships, the mighty city, the gathered crowd, all excited their astonishment, and their white teeth glistened as they chatted incessantly with a very babel of ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... city in this region is Tiflis, the "city of seventy languages." It may, indeed, be called the modern Babel. As seen from the mountains, it lies at the bottom of a brown, treeless valley, between steep hills, on either ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... foremost among them all was Aeneas son of Anchises with valiant Hector. As a flock of daws or starlings fall to screaming and chattering when they see a falcon, foe to all small birds, come soaring near them, even so did the Achaean youth raise a babel of cries as they fled before Aeneas and Hector, unmindful of their former prowess. In the rout of the Danaans much goodly armour fell round about the trench, and of fighting ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... was suddenly seized upon by one of the maids, and carried out into the orchard, when she began beating me with an iron spoon, and making as much noise as she possibly could; presently others of the family joined with tin pans and kettles, and such a babel of sound you never heard; this, I found afterwards, was to stupefy a swarm of bees and make them alight which, at last, they did. Then one of the men with a handkerchief over his face, and with gloves on, swept the bees into a new hive, ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... but, examined closely, it was found to glow with a faint fire, like the glimmer of summer lightning, with small star-like points of stronger light thickly scattered through it. The most perfect silence reigned outside the ship, but on board there was quite a small Babel of sound storming about us; the creaking of yard-parrels and trusses aloft, mingled with the loud flap of the canvas to the roll of the ship, the "cheep" of block-sheaves, the sharp "slatting" of suddenly tautened gear, and the pattering of reef-points; ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... and then to lay down in its margin the contradictory commentaries which have been, and which maybe, made by different States, the whole page would be a polyglot indeed. It would speak with as many tongues as the builders of Babel, and in dialects as much confused, and mutually as unintelligible. The very instance now before us presents a practical illustration. The law of the last session is declared unconstitutional in South Carolina, and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... as the letters on this page convey thoughts to the mind, so do the things of this world, organized into a language of symbols, speak to the soul through art. But in the building of our towers of Babel, again mankind is stricken with a confusion of tongues. Art has no common language; its symbols are no longer valid, or are no longer understood. This is a condition for which materialism has no remedy, for the reason that materialism sees always the pattern but never that ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... intellect, when all its powers are concentrated upon a single object, is capable of achieving. It seemed to me, as I looked at the performance, that if all the races of men, who had been stricken asunder at the foot of the Tower of Babel by the miracle which made the tongues of each to speak a language unknown to the others, could be brought together again at the foot of the same tower, with all the advantages which thousands of years of education had in the meantime imparted to them, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... have been a queer sight when the stage let them down at the Strand—dusty, dirty, tired and scared by the babel of sounds and sights! And no doubt Johnson's enormous size saved them from sundry insults and divers taunts that otherwise might have ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... open country beyond. His astonishment was great, therefore, when the car came to a sudden stop at the base of the tower, and the occupants fairly tumbled out in a gale of merriment and talk. In the babel of sounds Miss Wycliffe's voice detached itself, by its peculiar quality rather than by its power, causing his heart to vibrate as a ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... that built the Tower of Babel is now in the world-it is the spirit of the devil. The spirit of man never goes upon the clouds; all who think so are Babylonians. The only heaven is on earth. All who are ignorant of truth are Ninevites. ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... A babel of voices died away as the two men walked into a room rather smaller than that below and furnished with little tables, cafe fashion. At one end was a grand piano and a platform before which a velvet curtain was draped. Some twenty people, men and ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... of the Encyclopaedists had passed away, and the teachings of Rousseau had prevailed over those of Montesquieu and Voltaire. The sober sense of the economists was swept aside by the sound and fury of the demagogues, and France was become a very Babel of tongues. The old malady of words had swept over ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... mentioned, is not to be confounded with that between Jupiter and the Titans, who were inhabitants of heaven. The fall of the angels, as conveyed by tradition, probably gave rise to the story of the Titans; while, perhaps, the building of the tower of Babel may have laid the foundation of that of the attempt by the giants to reach heaven. Perhaps, too, the descendants of Cain, who are probably the persons mentioned in Scripture as the children 'of men' and 'giants,' were the race depicted under the form of the Giants, and the generation that ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... fiery snow, and great blazing fragments of roofs, and boards from lumber yards, sailed over his head, with the ill-omened glare of meteors. The rush and roar of the wind and flames were like the thunder of Niagara, and to this awful monotone accompaniment was added a Babel of sounds—shrieks, and shouts of human voices, the sharp crash of falling buildings, and ever and anon heavy detonations, as the fire reached explosive material. As he looked down into the white upturned faces in the thronged streets, it seemed to him as if the people might ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the close of a furious orgie; the Babel of cries, of fragments of songs, of insane, meaningless laughter, is dying away, through the pure exhaustion of the revelers; on the gay carpet and the rich damask are pools of spilled liquors, heaps of shivered glass, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... knot breeze, and continue to make some progress for an hour or two amidst a noise caused by the rumbling of the vehicle, the creaking, jingling, rattling, and clanking, of the atalage, the unceasing crack of the whip, and the chattering of your companions, to which the sounds at Babel were music. The movement then becomes adagio, and soon afterwards the conducteur's voice is heard, begging the passengers in all parts of the vehicle to descend. Wondering what is the matter, you get out with the rest, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... may have. Homer remains, perhaps, the greatest master in this art. The world he glorified by showing in how many ways it could serve reason and beauty was but a simple world, and an equal genius in these days might be distracted by the Babel about him, and be driven, as poets now are, into incidental dreams. Yet the ideal of mastery and idealisation remains the same, if any one could only attain it: mastery, to see things as they are and dare to describe them ingenuously; idealisation, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the book, Jew," yelled a deep voice above the babel of sound. "Give us the book and you shall live! Lady! Magnificence! Make the old man give us ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... the following statement of Mr. Layard, as to the multitudes which are to be found on the western coast. "At Chilaw, I have seen such vast flights of parroquets hurrying towards the coco-nut trees which overhang the bazaar, that their noise drowned the Babel of tongues bargaining for the evening provisions. Hearing of the swarms that resorted to this spot, I posted myself on a bridge some half mile distant, and attempted to count the flocks which came from a single direction ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... up, and going towards the nearest window strained his ears to listen. There fell on them, emerging now and again from the confused babel of hoarse shouts, the ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... in nothing so much perhaps as in the kind of delight we take in any form of building. The architectural efforts of a child with a box of bricks or a heap of sand explain the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids, and the Golden House of Nero. House-building unites the ideal with the real more thoroughly than any other human employment. What can there be more delightful than to see that which you have dreamed grow into tangible and enduring form? No wonder the rich man builds ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson |
