quagmire

noun

1. A swampy, soggy area of ground.

   “That quagmire regularly ‘swallows’ caught-up hikers’ boots”

   “Never did I see a more dreary and depressing scene. Miles on miles of quagmire, varied only by bright green strips of comparatively solid ground, and by deep and sullen pools fringed with tall rushes, in which the bitterns boomed and the frogs croaked incessantly: miles on miles of it without a break, unless the fever fog can be called a break.”

2. (figuratively)A perilous, mixed up and troubled situation; a hopeless tangle.

   “The paperwork got lost in a quagmire of bureaucracy.”

   “Those election results are a quagmire for any coalition except one of national union.”

   “"And what was this, my beloved brother, but a vain yielding to unbridled imagination, which, like a spring confined to one spot, collects its pure clear waters, and in at once a beauty and a blessing; but which, allowed to spread abroad in every direction, oozes through the marshy earth, becomes stagnant, and is habited by the loathsome reptile. That which would have been a green haunt, with its fair fountain, is a dreary and useless quagmire. Is it not thus with the mind, Guido?"”

   “I’ve had my doubts about Daenerys’ ability to rule, inspired in part by the quagmire in Meereen. Still, this feels like a precipitous decline. The queen of sobriquets has always been power hungry.”

   “The only way to know Shakespeare is through his works, and his works are textual quagmires.”

verb

1. (transitive)To embroil (a person, etc.) in complexity or difficulty.