That old house is a bottomless pit for money.
a bottomless pit
idiomSomething that consumes endlessly and can never be filled or satisfied.
Origin
The bottomless pit is imagery from the apocalyptic vision of Revelation. In chapter 9, verses 1 and 2, a star falls and is given the key to the shaft of the abyss, which opens to release smoke and locusts — the text's picture of a fathomless underworld from which torment rises.
The King James rendering bottomless pit fixed the phrase in English, and its literal impossibility — a hole with no floor — is exactly what made it useful as a metaphor.
Detached from prophecy, a bottomless pit is now anything that swallows whatever you put in and demands more: an insatiable appetite, an endlessly loss-making venture, a need that no amount of money or effort can ever fill.
The failing project became a bottomless pit, absorbing every extra pound the board threw at it without ever showing a return.
Grief, he discovered, could be a bottomless pit, and no amount of work, distraction, or well-meaning company seemed able to fill the space the loss had opened up in him.
End-times and final-judgment imagery, from the Gospels to Revelation.
- 01
Alpha and Omega (idiom)
The beginning and the end; the most essential or all-encompassing element of something.
- 02
fire-and-brimstone (word)
Threats of punishment or damnation, especially in stern moralising or preaching.
- 03
separate the sheep from the goats (idiom)
To distinguish the worthy or capable from the unworthy or inadequate.
- 04
gnashing of teeth (idiom)
Extreme distress, frustration, or anguished complaining.
- 05
cast into outer darkness (idiom)
To be completely excluded, banished, or shut out from a group or from favour.