"Boomerang" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their consideration. But in those days there were no literary agents or Authors' Societies to help young writers with their experience and advice, and the bulky manuscript always came back to my hand like a boomerang, till at length I wearied of the attempt. Of course I sent it to the wrong people; afterwards the editor of a leading monthly told me that he would have been delighted to run the book had it fallen ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... as a man-o'-war. Jack always was a good painter. There was a nice parlour on the ground floor, and Jack had papered it and had hung the walls with photographs of ships and foreign ports, and with things he had brought home from his voyages: a boomerang, a South Sea club, Japanese straw hats and a Gibraltar fan with a bull-fight on it, and all that sort of gear. It looked to me as if Miss Mamie had taken a hand in arranging it. There was a bran-new polished iron Franklin stove set into the old fireplace, and a red table-cloth from ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... supplied coigns of vantage for the look-out. Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers. With the help of a throwing-stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards. Ignorant of the bow-and-arrow and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling. With it red-hot stones would be hurled over the palisades, among the rush-thatched huts of an assaulted village, a stratagem all the more difficult to cope with as Maori pas seldom contained wells or springs of water. The courage ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... were all heavily-laden, some with wood, and others with burdens of various sorts, their lords and masters condescending to carry nothing but a couple of light wooden spears, a waddy, or native club, and a boomerang. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and a ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... one's parody-remonstrance thirty years later, and again we may think that the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself was soon to pronounce upon Empedocles is rather disastrously far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. Musical and philosophical despair is one of the innumerable strings of the poetic lyre; but 'tis not what our youth, or our age either, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... its mighty iron heart from one shore to the other. I saw at the same time the weapons that man has made, from a rude club, such as was grasped by that savage when he crawled from his den, from his hole in the ground, and hunted a snake for his dinner—from that club to the boomerang, to the sword, to the cross-bow, to the blunderbuss, to the flint-lock, to the cap-lock, to the needle-gun, up to the cannon cast by Krupp, capable of hurling a ball of 2,000 pounds through eighteen inches ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... BOOMERANG, a missile of hard curved wood used by the Australian aborigines of 21/2 ft. long; a deadly weapon, so constructed that, though thrown forward, it takes a whirling course upwards till it stops, when it returns with a swoop and falls in the rear ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is subject to a popular vote, is a boomerang. The appointment of a citizen in a town arouses the anger of many others who think they are more deserving. I appealed to the farmers with the simple question whether old Westchester should be controlled ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... small Turkish advanced work in the Saghir Dere known as the Boomerang Redoubt was assaulted. This little fort, which was very strongly sited and protected by extra strong wire entanglements, has long been a source of trouble. After special bombardment by trench mortar, and while bombardment of surrounding trenches was at its height, part of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... natives seen were armed with long lances and a piece of wood shaped like a scimitar. This was the famous "boomerang," so effective a weapon in the hands of the natives, so useless in that ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... was it!" he said. "Full to the scuppers, poor little wretch! Minnie, I am hoist with my own petard, which in this case was a boomerang." ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... through by people who know nothing about them, and never had any practice therein. What IS to know how to do a thing? Surely to do it. What is proof that we know how to do a thing? Surely the fact that we can do it. A man shows that he knows how to throw the boomerang by throwing the boomerang. No amount of talking or writing can get over this; ipso facto, that a baby breathes and makes its blood circulate, it knows how to do so and the fact that it does not know its own knowledge is only proof of the ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... cry was heard from one of the sentries. The men stooping round the fire leaped to their feet, just in time to see one of the constables struck from his horse by a boomerang, while a dozen spears whizzed through the air at the other. He fell forward on his horse, which carried him up to the fire; as he fell from the saddle, as it stopped, he was caught by two of the others. Three ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... least shade of sarcasm in the tone, and Greenleaf, as usual, was a little puzzled. For Easelmann was a study,—always agreeable, never untruthful, but fond of launching an idea like a boomerang, to sweep away, apparently, but to return upon some unexpected curve. His real meaning could not always be gathered from any isolated sentence; and to strangers he was a living riddle. But Greenleaf had passed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... you offered me poison that my life is one with your own. Except for my knowledge that God is present in my stomach, as in every atom of creation, the lime would have killed me. Now that you know the divine meaning of boomerang, never again ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... commanding, and not the army, whose lapses caused defeat. Not that I object to these Fast-Day resolutions. I believe that I can still struggle onward in life, even under the contempt of their authors. But partisanship in matters of history is a boomerang which always flies back to whack its thrower. And Fast Day's performance ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... sort of a weapon you suspect," thought Mitchell. "This is a boomerang." Aloud, he answered, lightly: "Oh, that's all right. I know I'm ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... lingering on into civilised life from the savage state, the new demand for labour of an intellectual kind is enormous. The invention, construction, and working of one Krupp gun, though its mere discharge hardly demands more crude muscular exertion than a savage expends in throwing his boomerang, yet represents an infinitude of intellectual care and thought, far greater than that which went to the shaping of all the weapons of a primitive army. Above all, in the domain of politics and government, where once a king or queen, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... constellation "The Boomerang." To the Hebrews it was "Ataroth" and by this name it is known in the East to-day. No two of the seven stars composing the Crown are moving in the same direction or ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... specimen of gold and the first diamond found in Australia. He was for a short time one of the members for the Port Phillip electorate, but resigned, as he found faithful discharge of the duties to be incompatible with his office. He patented the boomerang screw propeller, and was the author of many educational and other works, including a translation of the Lusiad of Camoens. Although a strict martinet in his official duties, and subject to a choleric temper, he was strenuous ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... is too thin for skating and the snow is not right for skis, about the only thing to do is to stay in the house. A boomerang club will help to fill in between and also furnishes good exercise for the muscles of the arm. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Petersburg Mine, Grant thought himself sure to make enormous gains; but Lee's insight into his purposes, and lightning celerity in checkmating these, foiled both movements, giving the mine operation, moreover, the effect of a deadly boomerang. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... could do very much with a boomerang; but I could throw a spear to a hair's breadth, as many a chicken had occasion to discover. When you go home for Christmas I hope you will remember that all this was very wrong, and that you will consider we are civilized people, not Mohicans, nor Pawnees. I also made a stone pipe, like ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... the savage race, the stout heart of Cambo was overcome, and beat visibly—the perspiration streamed from his breast, and he was about to sink to the ground, when he at length suddenly darted from my presence; but he speedily returned, bearing in one hand his club, and in the other his boomerang, with which he seemed to acquire just fortitude enough, to be able to stand on his legs, until I finished the sketch (See ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... a time of martyrdom he may give his body to be burned; and a man has a right to control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus, though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only that Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ought to ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... BOOMERANG.—This sign means news from Australia, or that some unexpected development will lead to your having a great interest in that country; with signs of travel, that you ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... clattering and whirling: for I was in danger of life. A band of the savage natives were stealthily creeping on my track,—the natives in those parts were not then so much awed by the white man as now. A boomerang(1) had whirred by me, burying itself amongst the herbage close before my feet. I had turned, sought to find and to face these dastardly foes; they contrived to elude me. But when I moved on, my ear, sharpened by danger, heard them moving, too, in my rear. Once only ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... look of old feudal fortresses, and up the paths leading to them, cut out in a defile in the vertical cliffs, we passed with difficulty coolies carrying on their backs the enormous loads, which are the wonder of all who have seen them, their backs straining under the boomerang-shaped frames to which the merchandise was lashed. Hundreds passed us on their toilsome journey with tea, lamp-oil, skins, hides, copper, lead, coal and white wax from Yuen-nan, and with salt, English ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... radical alteration in what happens afterwards. In that short space of time a spinning motion is put upon the ball, and a curious impulse which appears to have something in common with that given to a boomerang is imparted, which sooner or later take effect. In other respects, when a distant slice is wanted, the same principles of striking the ball and finishing the swing as governed the ordinary drive are to be observed. What I mean by a distant slice ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... in the world ever attempted to wrong another without being injured in return,—someway, somehow, sometime. The only weapon of offence that Nature seems to recognize is the boomerang. Nature keeps her books admirably; she puts down every item, she closes all accounts finally, but she does not always balance them at the end of the month. To the man who is calm, revenge is so far beneath him that he cannot reach it,—even by stooping. When injured, he does not retaliate; he ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... apparent renewal of the original impetus. If you take a flat stone and throw it so that it will spin, it will go some way straight, then rise, turn aside, describe a half-circle, and fall. If the impetus kept in it, it would soar like the hawk, but this does not happen. A boomerang acts much in the same manner, only more perfectly: yet, however forcibly thrown, the impetus soon dies out of a boomerang. A skater gets up his utmost speed, suddenly stands on one foot, and describes several circles; but in ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... gang strongly resembled a boomerang. So thoroughly and impartially did it do its work that it recoiled upon those who used it. The evil was one of long standing. Pepys complained of it bitterly in his day, asserting that owing to its prevalence ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... raised him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps, into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution has really been most marvellous, its steps have been ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... newspaper account of that Jew drummer's taking off. The newspaper could offer no theory and merely recited the fact that the man suffered from a heavy-calibred bullet. But always the talk turned back at last to that crowning atrocity, the Boomerang, with its windrows of little calves, starved for ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... mysteriously destroyed, but most fortunately a certified copy had been made, and this is now in the National Museum in Washington. Also, most fortunately, this effort on the part of some enemy to undermine the foundations of the case proved abortive, if, indeed, it was not a boomerang, for, as we have seen, the decision of the Supreme Court was in Morse's favor. In the year 1852, Commodore Perry sailed on his memorable trip to Japan, which, as is well known, opened that wonderful country to the outside world and started it on its ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... not been called to them. The following are a few instances taken at random of the way in which it was used: Pepi I., fighting against the nomads of Sinai, has the cloak, but with the two ends passed through the belt of his loin-cloth; at Zawyet el-Maiyitin, Khunas, killing birds with the boomerang from his boat, wears it, but simply thrown over the left shoulder, with the two extremities hanging free. Khnumhotpu at Beni-Hasan, the Khrihdbi, the overseers, or the peasants, all have it rolled and slung round them; the Prince of el-Bersheh wears it like a mantle in folds over the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... overpowering poison: turning on the gas—the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of club that can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You'll see some of them in ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... love a happy one; but this is it. Can you assure me that there is nothing in the past that may reach forward later and touch my daughter through you—no ugly story, no oats that have been sowed, and no boomerang that you have thrown wantonly and that has ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... by his apparent and deliberate sincerity. And while it was true that she had determined upon a method which was originally intended to redound to her own advantage, she soon learned that she was playing with a boomerang which soon put her upon the defensive against the very strategy which she had ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... on the photographs as a sort of halo around the object. The hands are either right or left, and, in some cases, both hands seem to have been stencilled at once. Sometimes the whole arm and hand are stencilled together, and in one of the photographs a boomerang is shown. The age of these stencils is not known. They were first discovered at Wolgan Gap about sixty years ago, but others have been known for a longer time, for instance, those at Greenwich, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... noticed upon the top-piece now reveal their purpose; as the tombo darts hither and thither, even the tints appear to be those of a real dragon-fly; and even the sound of the flitting toy imitates the dragon-fly's hum. The principle of this pretty invention is much like that of the boomerang; and an expert can make his tombo, after flying across a large room, return into his hand. All the tombo sold, however, are not as good as this one; we have been lucky. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... outright, not only at the boomerang effect of her grandiloquent description of the professor's industry, but at the absurdity of her position. Above all else, Helen was candid, and there was no reason why she should not enlighten a comparative stranger who seemed to take a ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... the idea of going around the world in ten days was as preposterous as that projected by Jules Verne in 1873 when he wrote Around the World in Eighty Days. But time has a way of hurling ridicule back as effectively as a boomerang. For we have seen and marvelled at the shattering not only of the mythical eighty-day record but even the ten-day record, as progress wends its ceaseless, ambitious, difficult and almost fantastic ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... business proved a boomerang," was Tom's comment. "It's a pity we didn't dig out for the shore, signal to the steam yacht, and tell father and the others ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... "that as soon as the revolutionary leaders succeeded in opening the eyes of the people to this view of the matter, my old friends the capitalists must have found their cry about 'the sacred right of property' turned into a most dangerous sort of boomerang." ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... secondly apologetic, and thirdly sincerely contrite. In the present instance, waiving the purely academic question whether the awakening of George at a little before five was due to natural instinct on his part, or to the accidental passing of a home-made boomerang through his bedroom window, the dear children frankly admitted that the blame for his uprising was their own. As ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... apart from being unprecedented in warfare, proved an exceedingly short-sighted one, and acted almost immediately after the manner of a boomerang. The able-bodied men of each family who had remained loyal or at least neutral, so long as they were permitted to live undisturbed on their few acres, were not content to exist on the charity of a city, and they swarmed over to the insurgent ranks by the hundreds, and it was only the old and ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... through a brown haze of boxing-glove. Occasionally his hand met something solid which he took to be Allen, but this was seldom, and, whenever it happened, it only seemed to bring him back again like a boomerang. Just at the most exciting point, ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... said the Governor. "He brought my heart up in my mouth as no one has done in years. Now, I must get word to some of the people in New York to find out who he is, and if this case has any concealed boomerang ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... "But whatever we've done has turned into a boomerang. We knew that the antibody might not work, and the disease might just go right ahead, but we didn't ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... sneered Engle. "Use your head a little more; that's what it's for. A man that hops his horses as often as you do can't afford to start any investigations along that line. If you must throw something at Curry, throw a brick, not a boomerang.... And somehow I don't believe it's hop. Fairfax was probably a good horse all the time, but Jimmy Miles didn't know it; and, as for training, Jimmy couldn't train a goat for a butting contest, let alone a ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... these polemical controversies, when conducted in the spirit of unfairness, or with greater asperity than the true interests of journalism demand. The beauty of its kindly advice to us, as a "scientific critic," was that every word of it came back, as a cruel boomerang, into the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... boomerang of Eastern and kiley of Western Australia) is another simple but destructive weapon, in the hands of the native. It consists of a thin, flat, curved piece of hard wood, about two feet long, made out of the acacia pendula or gum-scrub, the raspberry-jam ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... a laugh from the tolerant hearers. This is all very well in farce, but such anti-climax becomes painful when the speaker falls from the sublime to the ridiculous quite unintentionally. The pause, to be effective in some other manner than in that of the boomerang, must precede or follow a thought that is really worth while, or at least an idea whose bearing upon the rest of the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... You'll be, oh, so surprised some day when you learn a little about the laws of thought—even the way human thought operates! For you can't possibly do another person an injury without that injury flying back and striking you. It's a regular boomerang! You may not feel the effects of its return right away—but it does return, and the effects accumulate. And then, some day, when you least expect it, comes the crash! But, when you love a person, why, that comes back to you too; and it never comes alone. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fired. The weeds and dust flew up off to one side of her, and she turned at right angles out of the furrow; but as she got to the top of the bed, Milker-Tim, flinging back his arm, with the precision of a bushman, sent his stick whirling like a boomerang skimming along the ...
— The Long Hillside - A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... a boomerang that comes back to hit the emitting skull with a hint of its kindred woodenness. It reveals the writer more than the written of. Allan was a bigger man than you would gather from Wilson's account of his Gargantuan revelry. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... meant, for Lord Charlemont, that he was loyal to the death. He was not romantic in the style of expressing himself,—he would not have understood how to swear fealty on a drawn sword—but when he said—'I'm game,'-it came to the same thing. Reversing his car, he sped away, whizzing up the road like a boomerang, back to Badsworth Hall. Maryllia watched him till he was out of sight,—then with a sigh of relief, she turned and look wistfully at the church. Its beautiful architecture had the appearance of worn ivory in the mellow radiance of the late afternoon, and the sculptured figures of the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... I had you unleash Mighty Mouse. All that hate in hundreds of millions of people had to boomerang back through your Gestalt in some psi-fashion ... although I did not anticipate the pyrotechnics—or should I ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... no equivalent or substitute for precision. It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected of heresy, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... to my hand, But,—will it fly obedient to command, And hit the mark I mean? Would I were sure; Then should I hold my new-found seat secure, Without a thought of Saturn, or that Hour Which sets a term e'en to Olympian pow'r. But what if like a boomerang, it fly Back to my hand, or, worse, into mine eye? Ah, Ganymede, Jupiter Tonans seems A splendid part, in young ambition's dreams, But, Ganymede, who would aspire, I wonder, To be a Jove who's half afraid ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... much, and this latest effort to stop its onward march was of even less force than the diatribes of the Mohammedan priests. The coffee houses continued to be as much frequented as before, and the people drank no less coffee in their homes. Indeed, the indictment proved a boomerang, for consumption received such an impetus that the merchants of Lyons and Marseilles, for the first time in history, began to import green coffee from the Levant by the ship-load in order to ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... miracle! the land But yesterday was all unknown, The wild man's boomerang was thrown Where now great busy cities stand. It was not much, you say, that these Should win their way where none withstood; In sooth there was not much of blood No war was fought ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... from directly behind is not so good, since the motor acts as a protection). In vain he tried to get out of this poor position; I did not give him the chance. I came so close to him that my machine was smutted by the ensuing explosion of his 'plane. He fell, twisting like a boomerang. The observer fell out of ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... principle of the recoil of judgments. Your judgments of others are in reality the most complete betrayal of yourself. What you think of them is the key to your own soul. Your careless utterances are like the boomerang of some clumsy savage, often missing the mark toward {33} which it is thrown, and returning to smite the man ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... Base Ball season the Brotherhood League dealt what it believed to be a death blow to the National League by the purchase of the Cincinnati franchise. It proved to be a boomerang, for before the first day of January, 1891, the Brotherhood League had passed out of existence. The backers of the organization, tired of the general conduct of the sport, were only too willing to come to an acceptable ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... obtained from these people about one hundred spears, thirty throwing-sticks, forty hammers, one hundred and fifty knives, and a few hand-clubs, the value of each being at from half to one-eighth of a biscuit. We saw no fizgig, shield, nor boomerang; it is probable that they may have such weapons but did not produce them from a dislike at parting with them; but the knives, spears, and hammers which did not require much labour to manufacture were always ready for barter, particularly the first, but the greater part were, like Peter ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... dugout indescribably slack; hardly energy to struggle against the heat and the myriads of flies. I came out of it radiant. The Turks are beat. Five lines of their best trenches carried (or, at least, four regular lines plus a bit extra); the Boomerang Redoubt rushed, and in two successive attacks we have advanced 1,000 yards. Our losses are said to be moderate. The dreaded Boomerang collapsed and was stormed with hardly a casualty. This was owing partly ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space, clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, and men still go back ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... a curious weapon, the trombash, that is used by these people, somewhat resembling the Australian boomerang; it is a piece of flat, hard wood, about two feet in length, the end of which turns sharply at an angle of about 30 degrees. They throw this with great dexterity, and inflict severe wounds with the hard and sharp edge; ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... work covered with pinon pith mats and girdles, threads of fibre or hair, and sandals plaited of yucca leaves. Wads of cotton and pieces of pottery were found in many places; and an interesting find was a "boomerang" similar to that used to this day by the Moqui Indians for killing rabbits. The handle is plainly seen, but the top is broken. The implement, which is made of very hard, reddish wood, has but a slight curve. We discovered many smooth pieces of iron ore that had probably been used for ceremonial ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the points of flame on the white candles. "I suppose it would be so with you; for you fit into the age. You are a part of this variable uncertain quantity called democracy, which some of us old-fashioned folk look upon as a boomerang." ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the newspapers, exactly as it had come to him. And what a setting! Curly shot from ambush, by creatures, it was highly probable, who were ignorantly actuated by Brown's own crooked Mexican policy. Curly flinging, with his dying hands, the boomerang that was to strike Brown down. That incidentally it would pull Fowler down, moved Enoch little. Fowler too would be hoist ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... speech-making, although hundreds of misguided individuals act as though they think so. Nor is a good introduction the one that begins with a comic incident supposedly with a point pat to the occasion or topic, yet so often miles wide of both. The funny story which misses its mark is a boomerang. Even the apparently "sure-fire" one may deliver a disturbing kick to its perpetrator. The grave danger is the "o'er done or come tardy off" of Hamlet's advice to the players. Humor must be distinctly marked off from ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... a weapon of precision, but would seem to have rather more the character of the boomerang, which returns to damage the reckless thrower. Doubtless such incidents are somewhat ludicrous. But they have a very serious side; and, if I rated the opinion of those who blindly follow Mr. Gladstone's leading, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... may be. They are bigger than I, and unless I get even with them by punishment, I would cut a sorry figure. But in the attempt to get even, if I resort to ordinary means, they are sure to make it a boomerang. If I tell them, "You're wrong," they will start an eloquent defence, because they are never short of the means of sidestepping. Having defended themselves, and made themselves appear suffering martyrs, they would begin attacking me. As the incident would have ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... bills, at which the New York capitalist had exclaimed that the state right for Iowa alone would bring one hundred thousand dollars. Even more remunerative, it would seem, had been his other patent—the folding boomerang. The manager of the largest boomerang factory in Australia stood ready to purchase this device for ten million dollars. And there was a final view of the little home after prosperity had come to its inmates so long threatened with ruin. A sign over the door read "Ye ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson |
