Famous quotes containing the words holding and/or ransom:
“... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“But this was the old tree’s late branch wrenched away,
Grieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)