"Wreckage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A splintered boat and a number of crates and fragments of spars rising and falling on the waves showed us where the vessel had foundered; but there was no sign of life, and we had turned away in despair when we heard a cry for help, and saw at some distance a piece of wreckage with a man lying stretched across it. When we pulled him aboard the boat he proved to be a young seaman of the name of Hudson, who was so burned and exhausted that he could give us no account of what had happened until the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when it no longer ministered to his personal prestige? Jewdwine was aware that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of a soul nourished mainly upon formulas. Yet behind that moral wreckage there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner soul that judged him, as it judged all things, holding the pellucid immaterial view. Its vision had never been bound, even by the Prolegomena. If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... stood at the curbing, where his service car, having towed it in, had left it as though the night foreman had been unwilling to give so complete a ruin storage space within the garage. Alongside the wreckage was Red Hoss, endeavoring more or less unsuccessfully to make himself small and inconspicuous. Upon ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... inadmissible by the circumstances attending the return of Brooks's comet in 1896.[1349] The companion-objects watched by Barnard in 1889 had by that time, perhaps, become dissipated in space, for they were not redetected. They represented, in all likelihood, wreckage from a collision with Jupiter, dating, perhaps, so far back as 1791, when Mr. Lane Poor found that one of the fateful meetings to which short-period comets are especially subject ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Simons told me,—the one about the mill back of Woodstock caving in from the freshet and burying the miller's girl. No one dared lift the timbers until Jonathan crawled in. The child was pinned down between the beams, and the water rose so fast they feared the wreckage would sweep the mill. Jonathan clung to the sills waist-deep in the torrent, crept under the floor timbers, and then bracing his back held the beam until he dragged her clear. It happened a good many years ago, but Hank always claimed it ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... shrieks and cries of the wounded passengers were something appalling. Already the passengers in the fore part of the train, who had escaped unhurt, together with the officials and a few villagers who happened to be on the spot, were doing their best to rescue these unfortunates from the terrible wreckage in ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... is fresh on the field Where the war-sick champions lie, By the wreckage of stiffening dead, The anguish that yearns but to die. Ah note of human agony heard The paean of victory over and through! Ah voice of duty and justice stern That, at e'en this price, commands them to ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... many ships. Allo told me they would never rest till they had taken a tower in open fight. Certainly they fought in the open. We dealt with them thoroughly through a long day: and when all was finished, one man dived clear of the wreckage of his ship, and swam towards shore. I waited, and a wave tumbled ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... to write a book entitled: "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." How much is buried in the wreckage of yesterday—how uninteresting today is and how little is to be done—our burden we shift to the strong, young shoulders of tomorrow; tomorrow of the big heart, who in kindness hides our sorrows and whispers only of hope. I ended by ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... Seashore with wreckage of cast up seaweed, etc. To left an up-rooted oak-stump, fishing tackle and hulk of a wrecked vessel. Background: open sea; seamews float on waves. To right cliff-shore with pine woods; lower down is ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... bit of old wreckage," said the other. "Anyway, it wasn't another vessel, and it was too ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... and petroleum stores, all our horse vehicles and vans and lorries had to be erased. . . . But I have said enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk and quality of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down, our toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in those ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... spitted on the steeple o' one o' them Honfleur churches. Well, in the morning there I was washin' about, nigh out of sight of land, clingin' on to half the foreyard, without a sign either of my mates or of wreckage. I wasn't so cold, for it was early fall, and I could get three parts of my body on to the spar, but I was hungry and thirsty and bruised, so I just took in two holes of my waist-belt, and put up a hymn, and had a look round for what I could see. Well, I saw more than I cared for. Within five ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his eyes wander over the wreckage as his right index finger spun the dial. Actually, the room wasn't as much of a shambles as it had looked on first sight. The—burglar?—hadn't tried to get at anything but the Converter. He hadn't known exactly where it was, ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... duds everywhere, men sitting in dug-outs, not knowing what they are expected to do next. Others in mere scratched-out shelters or in actual shell holes. Sometimes they sing. Often they are asleep. Wreckage indescribable. Shrapnel cracking into black clouds close by. Enormous and magnificent H.E.'s hurling up black earth and red earth, and smoke that drifts slowly and solidly away to limbo. Poor dead men lying about, and dead horses, too. And in the trenches this limitless ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... first exquisite softness of the expanding life was gone; things harder, stranger, more inexplicable than any which those who knew her best had yet perceived, seemed now and then to come to the surface, like wreckage in ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with his disengaged hand. For one fleet instant he had a confused vision of the destruction of the ship. Both the fore and aft portions were burst asunder by the force of compressed air. Wreckage and human forms were tossing about foolishly. The sea pounded upon the opposing rocks with the noise of ten ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... apart," commented Barry. "While she was living with him she made a bigger hash of his life than she can do when she's away. She was spoiling his work as well as his life. And old Peter's work means a lot to him. He's still got that left out of the wreckage." ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... had worked so hard and from which he had hoped so much. He felt heartsick as he saw the broken fence-posts and tangled wire, the weeds growing in his wheat-field, the broken window-panes, and the wreckage inside his cabin. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... and Streckfuss had the nap worn off their plushy sleekness. They were surveying the wreckage, and dolefully realizing that some of the Christmas bills would not be paid ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... helps NORA to take off the front of the piano, which is still mildly smoking; a wreckage of ...
— The Gibson Upright • Booth Tarkington
... end, and when again he bobbed up to the surface, his breath was all but gone. The great bulk of the vessel was no longer in sight, and Jimmie was struggling in a whirlpool, along with upset boats and oars and deck-chairs and miscellaneous wreckage, and scores of people clinging to such objects, or swimming frantically to ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... meet itself. The fact remains that often we seem to be left to the mercy of the tempest; the elements do their worst and no hand is lifted and no voice is heard that still the waves. Full often the storm seems to finish its work and only clinging to the wreckage or swept on the waves ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... tried to bear away and shake off his assailant. But in vain. The English guns now opened on his masts and rigging. Down came the mizzen, while a hail of English shot and arrows prevented every attempt to clear away the wreckage. The dumbfounded Spanish crew ran below, Don Anton looked overside to port; and there was the English pinnace, from which forty English boarders were nimbly climbing up his own ship's side. Resistance was hopeless; so Anton struck and was taken aboard ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... bit o' wreckage," ses Alf, nodding at 'im, "just like they do in books, and was picked up more dead than alive and took to Melbourne. He's now living up-country ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... steel in him instinctively. In his quiet way he was coming to be a power. For one thing he was possessed of the political divination that understands how far a leader may go without losing his following. He knew too how to get practical results. It was these qualities that enabled him out of the wreckage of the senatorial defeat to build a foundation of victory ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... land over will turn the whole proposition of the flotation down, and quit us cold. But that's not just all. No, sir. Elas Peterman isn't the boy to leave it that way. He's handing out the story that when Sachigo smashes the Skandinavia's going to jump right in and collect the wreckage cheap. Then they'll start up the mill, and sign on all hands on their own pay-roll, only stipulating that they won't pay one single cent of what Sachigo owes for their cut. So, if they're such almighty fools as to cut, it's going to be their dead loss and the Skandinavia's gain. Do you get ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... away at the top of the building was a lonely room where the sun never shone, in which were stored away the old account-books, diaries, and various dead-and-done-with documents of the firm; and here too was deposited, from time to time, various wreckage of the same kind from other businesses whose last offices had been done by the firm, and whose records were still preserved, in the unlikely event of any chance resurrection of claim upon, or interest in, their long ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... said; the two kegs, one empty and the other full, were floating about ten yards off, at the length of the rope by which they were attached to the boys, while with them was a confused mass of wreckage ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... sitting among the wreckage of the past, found herself disgraced, discredited, and at war with all of Europe. Austria, naturally the leader in an effort to stop the atrocities which threatened a daughter of her own royal house, had been joined finally by England, Holland, Spain, and even ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... are times when speech is worse than useless. He stood by the window, looking over at that shrunken figure on the groat old-fashioned four-post bed, with its voluminous drab damask curtains, its cords, fringes, tassels, and useless decorations—the nerveless, helpless figure of wasted youth, the wreckage of an ill-spent life. The haggard countenance, damp with the dews of mental agony, and of a livid pallor, looked like the face of death. What could medicine do for this man beyond diagnosing his case, and giving an opinion about it, for the satisfaction—God save the mark!—of his ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between these two worlds—something like the Ocean which separates the old world from Young America, something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage, traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship breathing out a heavy vapor; the present, in a word, which separates the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resemble both, and where one can ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... been in some respects the most ape-like of human beings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a surprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea, are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage. Finally, if we turn our gaze southward, we find that Negritos until the other day inhabited Tasmania; whilst in Australia a strain of Negrito, or Negro (Papuan), blood is likewise to ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the "Linseed Lancers." We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage is always a sad sight—human wreckage ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... Agnew and Jonas, patch up the Ida; and Harden, you stay with me and let's see what the maps say about the chances of our getting out before we reach the Ferry. When the rest have finished the patch, you and Agnew row downstream and see if you can pick up any wreckage from ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Then he began to drag posts, pieces of rafter and other wreckage over to the cave. He laid the longest pieces sloping against the cave-mouth—he badly wanted his father to be within four walls,—covered them over and filled the gaps with bits of sail-cloth and anything else handy, and finished by shovelling snow up over the whole structure. Before long it was ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... torpedo had struck the ship she had disappeared beneath the surface of the sea. "Above the spot where she had gone down," said one of the men who escaped death, "there was nothing but a nondescript mass of floating wreckage. Everywhere one looked there was a sea of waving hands and arms, belonging to the struggling men and frantic women and children in agonizing efforts to keep afloat. That was the most horrible memory and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... Brow, beneath them as they looked down, they saw a shining mass of white, which looked strangely out of place amongst such wreckage as they had been viewing. It appeared so strange that Adam suggested trying to find a way down, so that they might ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... mighty power of the remorseless sea. Bit by bit their foothold vanished from beneath them. One by one they were swept off into the seething cauldron of the storm. At last but one man remained, the cook of the ill-fated vessel, who floated about for three days on a piece of wreckage, until, half-starved and nearly crazed, he was picked up by a passing vessel, and told the tale of the wreck. So ended the career of the patriotic and gallant Capt. Wickes and his crew, and such is the fate that every stout fellow braves when he dons his blue jacket and goes to serve ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... bulkheads, and anything that would float. So swiftly was the rescue effected that the rescuer had luffed and filled and was tearing on its way down the lake again when the close-hauled Clytie came up with the first of the floating wreckage. The tiller maiden's dark eyes were shining again, but this time ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... a fleshly blossom more white than augmenting tempests that go, with thunder for weapon, to ravage the strait waste fastness of snow. She sang how that all men on earth said, whether its mistress at morn went forth or waited till night,—whether she strove through the foam and wreckage of shallow and firth, or couched in glad fields of corn, or fled from all human delight,—that thither it likewise ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines—the cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled, slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... which you will notice are found everywhere. They understood the art of weaving, in a very primitive way, which I also tried to improve. Only on three occasions did we take any toll from the sea, when the wreckage came ashore. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... at Post Seven, wasn't so lucky, though Frank had tipped him off. Half of the post was scattered and pirated. Six fellas and the wife of one of them—a Bunch from Baltimore—were just drying shreds that drifted in the wreckage. Big Joe, though he had a rocket chip through his chest, had been able to beat off the attackers, with the help of a few asteroid-hoppers and his novice crew which turned out to be more rugged than ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... appear to be the wreckage of psychoanalysis. It is said that "half the neurotics of London" consult him about their souls. I have no idea of the manner in which he treats these unhappy people, but I am perfectly sure that he gives them counsel of a healthy nature. There is nothing about him ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... elusion of his pursuit. Thus the chance might yet be mine of returning to Rome and the honourable employment Cesare Borgia had promised me. If only that were so to fall out, I might yet contrive to mend the wreckage of my life. I was returned, it seems, to the ways of early youth, when we build our hopes of future greatness upon ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... the Sagalie Tyee Himself could not control the havoc that he created. He warred upon all fishing craft, he demolished canoes and sent men to graves in the sea. He uprooted forests and drove the surf on shore heavy with wreckage of despoiled trees and with beaten and bruised fish. He did all this to reveal his powers, for he was cruel and hard of heart, and he would laugh and defy the Sagalie Tyee, and looking up to the sky he would call, 'See how powerful I am, how ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... colleges were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was the inevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the master and the ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm. Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885 to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The land saw glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The educational system ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... vision of a shattered black mass, a tangle of girders, wires, collapsed planes, that seemed to hang a moment in midair—of whirling bodies—of wreckage indescribable. Then the broken debris plunged with awful speed and vanished ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... boys wanted to go to town—to see the damaged hotel—but Doctor Clay would not permit this. In the meantime the wreckage was being cleared away, and the authorities and Jason Sparr were doing their best to locate the author ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... to get away, but it was a long time before they could get near the dangerous bar sands, on which the vessel had struck, and when they did get there, the ship had disappeared. There was plenty of wreckage about—broken spars, fragments ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... without the support of the heart. How thickly are the shores of time strewn with those forms of wreckage called great thoughts. In those far-off days when the overseers of the Egyptian King scourged 80,000 slaves forth to their task of building a pyramid, a great mind discovered the use of steam. Intellect achieved an instrument for lifting ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... were mostly of the English breed, which made us suppose that they had been landed from some English vessel. We were confirmed in this belief by discovering an old hen-coop, in which they had probably been washed ashore. There were other pieces of wreckage scattered about, but the hut itself was composed entirely of the products ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... Spaniard's suspicions were aroused, and he determined to keep the sailor on board as his prisoner while a number of men were sent ashore to see if anything could be discovered. They soon come back and reported that upon the beach they had seen portions of wreckage which had evidently formed part of a Spanish galleon. The Feringhee seaman was strictly questioned by the commander, but at first would say nothing. Stung at length by Don Luego's taunts, he pointed towards the tattered flag which still floated from the broken mast, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... remained naught to vent its wrath upon, like an insatiate giant, it turned toward the jungle. Straight up the river it marched, rooting up trees, tearing down banks, and gradually vanished in the distance, leaving wreckage and disaster in ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... that somehow, by accident or miracle, I would be kept in funds indefinitely. I do recall my amazement at the abrupt ending of my dreams. I woke up one morning to discover I had no money, no assets. There were no odds and ends, even, of wreckage which I could salvage for one more week of ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... decadence at an age some generation or two before the time when they should still possess all their virile attributes, can be directly attributed to this cause. A more intelligent way of dressing would result in less moral and physical wreckage, and require less galvanic belts and aphrodisiacs in men under fifty. If those who habitually swath their scrotums in the heavy folds of their flannel shirts, to which are superadded the cotton shirts, drawers, and outer clothes in which civilized man incases himself, would cast ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... senses. The land forces had vanished during the darkness of a rainy night, and ship after ship, sail after sail, was drifting downstream—was it possible?—in retreat. Another week's bombarding would have reduced Quebec to flame and starvation; but another week would have exposed Phips' fleet to wreckage from winter weather, and he had drifted down to Isle Orleans, where the {183} dismantled fleet paused to rig up fresh masts. It was Madame Jolliet who suggested to the Puritan commander an exchange ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... over but the wreckage remained. The episode did Laurier harm in the English provinces. It predisposed the public mind to suspicion and thus made possible the ne temere and Eucharist congress agitations which were later factors in solidifying Ontario against him. In Quebec it gave Mr. Bourassa, whose hostility to Laurier ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... to a standstill at the sight of a mass of wreckage near the river. Smoke was issuing from it. I looked on my map and saw that it was the village of Brie; a small section was this side of the river, but the main part was on the other side. The whole place had been completely ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... wall blown out showing an upstairs with a stairway swinging from the floor, beams from the roof fallen over the iron bedstead, sheets of wall paper dangling from the walls, and every other imaginable combination of wreckage. And yet a few doors away down the street where the houses had not been very badly damaged they were occupied by civilians who tried to eke out an existence by ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... About her throat, knotted loosely, was a flaming-red silken scarf. The thought struck him that the Temple fortunes, the Temple ranch, the Temple master, all were falling or had already fallen into varying states of decay, and that alone in the wreckage Terry Temple made a gay spot of color, that alone Terry Temple was determined to keep her ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... to see the wreckage of the city—shattered walls, tumbled buildings, streets with rubble still piled in them. Weeds and creeping vines grew over the broken bones of this city as if they were attempting to hide ...
— Be It Ever Thus • Robert Moore Williams
... can make no more helpful contribution by example than prove a Republic's capacity to emerge from the wreckage of war. While the world's embittered travail did not leave us devastated lands nor desolated cities, left no gaping wounds, no breast with hate, it did involve us in the delirium of expenditure, ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... cannot prove that success is absolutely impossible. Through greater persistence and better methods the new may succeed where the old have failed. Moreover, although we are ready to grant that the pathway to our goal is full of pitfalls, marked by the wreckage of old theories, yet we claim that the skeptic or the mystic can know of their existence only by traveling over the pathway himself; for in the world of the inner life nothing can be known by hearsay. If, then, he would really know that the ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... indicator wavered, went slowly, deliberately to zero; the altimeter died; the fuel gauge. Finally, even the dozen or so trouble-indicators here, there, everywhere about the craft. Fifteen million dollars worth of warcraft was being shot into wreckage. ...
— Dogfight—1973 • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of either brick or stone within the effective limits of the blast were severely damaged so that most of them were flattened or reduced to rubble. The wreckage of a church, approximately 1,800 feet east of X in Nagasaki, was one of the few masonry buildings still recognizable and only portions of the walls of this structure were left standing. These walls were extremely thick (about 2 feet). The two domes of the church ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... kind he stands alone, Torn by the passions of his own strange heart, Stoned by continual wreckage of his dreams, He in the crowd for ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... a savage figure, stained with blood, showed ruthless energy. Driving the men who remained unwounded, he compelled them to cut away the wreckage and to throw the dead overboard. Garrulous, possessed by some demon, he boasted to them of many prizes they would yet take, and he pointed to the black flag which still floated overhead, unharmed through all the battle. He boasted of it as a good omen and succeeded in infusing into ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... anything on the reef, for it was only from the hill-top that a full view of what was there could be seen, and then only by eyes knowing where to look. From the beach there was visible just a speck. It might have been, perhaps, a bit of old wreckage flung there by a wave in some big storm. A piece of old wreckage that had been tossed hither and thither for years, and had at last found a ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... put each man to his station, and I had the sense to picket them a little distance from the house. The Englishmen were clumsy conspirators. We watched them arrive, let them pass, and followed silently on their heels. Their business was wreckage, and they fixed a charge of powder by the tobacco shed, laid and lit a fuse, and retired discreetly into the bushes ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... sank, and that's about the same thing. It was abandoned quite a way out, but off this part of the coast. There is a current setting in towards shore, at this point, I'm told, and I thought I might get some news of her, or find some of the wreckage floating in on the beach. That's why ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... had hit others besides him it seemed. The channel was full of ships, aimless ships that tossed between tide and wind. Looking closer, he saw that they were all wreckage. There had been tremendous doings in the north, and a navy of some sort had come to grief. Atta was a prudent man, and knew that a broken fleet might be dangerous. There might be men lurking in the maimed galleys who would make short work of the owner of a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Mormons of the Virgin River section. They had been advised by Brigham Young to look out for the Powell expedition and Asa (Joseph Asay) and his sons continued to watch the river, though a false report had come that the Powell expedition was lost. They were looking for wreckage that might give some indication of the fate of the explorers when Powell's boats appeared. Powell was very appreciative of Asaqy's kindness and wrote enthusiastically of the coming, next day from St. Thomas, of James Leithead, with a wagonload ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... appalling. Dismembered legs and trunks of bodies were floating about, together with pieces of clothing, boxes of meats, and all sorts of wreckage. Now and then the agonised cry of some poor suffering fellow could ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from Ausonius to the Chanson de Roland. From the earliest literary stages of the Teutonic tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, very little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the puzzling characteristic that its earliest remains are, coeteris paribus, nearly as complete and developed as the earliest remains of Greek. In German itself, whether ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... lighted form of blue and gold, Whom the seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced; Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh; Desired and hated, desperately dear; Most human of them was. No more pursue! Enough that the black story can be told. It preaches to the eminently placed: For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due, Paints omen. Truly they our throbber had; The passions plumping, passions playing leech, Cunning to trick us for the day's good cheer. Our uncorrected human heart will swell To notions monstrous, doings mad As billows ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a terrible crash and grinding, shrill screams, with the sharp, taunting laughter of Dan ringing clear, as his vessel swept clear of the wreckage, flashing by the crowded small boats which had been lowered a few seconds before the crash came. Hardly knowing what she was doing, utterly beside herself, Virginia turned to her friends, her lips parted, ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... starry tune Which Galileo's "old discoverer" first Dimly revealed, dissolving into clouds The imagined fabric of our universe. "Jupiter stands in heaven and will stand Though all the sycophants bark at him," he cried, Hailing the truth before he, too, went down, Whelmed in the cloudy wreckage of ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... won't go anywhere but to the Alps!' She bent her eyes on the floor. Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from the Alps. He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia: granite, as he thought. And the reflux of that slight feeling of despair seemed to tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had made in life, and cry failure on him. Yet he was hoping that he had not been ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... moved down their valleys they carried, imprisoned in their bodies and heaped upon their backs and sides, the plunder from their wreckage of the range. This they heaped as large moraines in the broad valleys. The moraines of the Rocky Mountain National Park are unequalled, in my observation, for number, size, and story-telling ability. They are conspicuous ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... bread, I think. At the same time we had come to the ruins—the same time of day, that is—the Germans had dropped a half-dozen incendiary shells into the building and it had burned in ten minutes. Most of the men who had been there then were still there, under the smoking mass of wreckage; the smell of burned human flesh ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... getting pictures of the 'Endurance' in her death-throes. While he was engaged thus, the ice, driving against the standing rigging and the fore-, main- and mizzen-masts, snapped the shrouds. The foretop and topgallant-mast came down with a run and hung in wreckage on the fore-mast, with the fore-yard vertical. The main-mast followed immediately, snapping off about 10 ft. above the main deck. The crow's-nest fell within 10 ft. of where Hurley stood turning the handle of his camera, but he did not stop the ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... before. Working on your own is a relative term. At all stages there would be somebody adjacent for your own safety and well-being. I did not at any stage see Ian Gemmell Capt. Gemmell or Ian Wood or David Graham in total isolation in any part of the wreckage." ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... carriages, strong boxes, card-tables, discarded flights of stairs and banisters, were heaped together pell-mell under the dust, among ropes and pulleys, a wilderness of damaged, broken, demolished, cast-off stage properties. Bernard Jansoulet, as he lay amid that wreckage, his shirt torn away from his chest, at once bleeding and bloodless, was the typical shipwrecked victim of life, bruised and cast ashore with the pitiable debris of his artificial splendor broken and scattered by the Parisian whirlpool. Paul, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward, half-submerged, reminding him for all the world of a ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... home. "On every surface have I already sat!...I become thin, I am almost equal to a shadow!" At last, in despair, such men do indeed cry out: "Nothing is true; all is permitted," and then they become mere wreckage. "Too much hath become clear unto me: now nothing mattereth to me any more. Nothing liveth any longer that I love,—how should I still love myself! Have I still a goal? Where is MY home?" Zarathustra realises the danger threatening such a man. "Thy danger ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the kitchen. Pa gave a small chuckle of joy. His progress was accelerated. They reached the table, and Emmy took his right arm for the descent into a substantial chair. Upon Pa's plate glistened a fair dumpling, a glorious mountain of paste amid the wreckage of meat and gravy. "And now, perhaps," Emmy went on, smoothing back from her forehead a little streamer of hair, "you'll ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... hammocks, when, by a terrific explosion, two hundred and fifty-eight men and two officers were hurled into eternity, sixty more were wounded, and the superb battle-ship was reduced to a mass of shapeless wreckage. ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... that; for a Willy-Willy had taken Cheon unaware when he was laden with a tray containing every glass and china cup fate had left us, and, as by a miracle, those two glasses had been saved from the wreckage. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... While the wreckage of Russia's once proud fleet lay concealed in Port Arthur's inner basin, the Japanese, after scouring the waters to clear them from mines, landed troops on the Liaotung Peninsula, claimed by Japan after the war with China, but despoiled of it by Russia's peaceful absorption. ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... one anxiety of all hands was to get home as quickly as possible for fear that some rumor of the disaster in the form of wreckage from the schooner might carry to their loved ones news of the accident, and lead them to be terrified over their apparent deaths. As soon as possible after dawn of day, the skipper started for home, having borrowed a small rodney, and the wind still keeping in the same quarter. To his ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... to examine the human wreckage. No need to examine Billy —his record for good or ill was manifestly closed: and Lawrence had a sickening suspicion that Mrs. Janaway too had finished with a world which perhaps had not offered her much ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... occurrence. On September 11, 1706, Peter drew from his pocket the measure he always carried about him, and convinced himself that there were twenty-one inches of water above the floors of his cottage. In all directions he saw men, women, and children clinging to the wreckage of buildings, which was being carried down the river. He described his impressions in a letter to Menshikoff, dated from "Paradise," and declared it was "extremely amusing." It may be doubted whether he found many persons ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... now disabled, and we could hurt her no more. If the others came up on our weather we should be chewed like a bone in a mastiff's jaws. If she must fight again, the Araminta would be little fit for action till we cleared away the wreckage; so I sheered off to make all sail. We ran under courses with what canvas we had, and got away with a fair breeze and a good squall whitening to windward, while our decks were cleared for action again. The guns on the main-deck had done good service and kept their places. On the quarter-deck ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... our friend CHARLES HALL, A.D.C., Trin. Coll. Cam., and Q.C., is likely to be made a Judge. Where will he sit? Admiralty, Probate, and Divorce Court, where wreckage cases of ships and married lives are heard? Health to the Judge that shall be, with a song and chorus, if you please, Gentlemen, to the ancient air of "Samuel Hall," revived for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... was lashing itself into a merciless fury. Boundless might was loosening into frenzy. He had seen the misshapen wreckage of houses and barns ride by, bobbing like bits of cork. He had seen the swirl of foam that was like the froth of a ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... throbbing of the engine as the train slipped along through the silence of the country-side—the next, and the silence was split by a shattering roar and the shock of riven plates, the clash of iron driven against iron, and of solid woodwork grinding and grating as it splintered into wreckage. ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... ice-water. The steersman had yelled for each to save himself; but Mackenzie shouted out a countermand for every man to hold on to the gunwales. In this fashion they were all dragged several hundred yards till a whirl sent the wreck into a shallow eddy. The men got their feet on bottom, and the wreckage was hauled ashore. During the entire crisis the Indians sat on top of the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut |
