"Rudderless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it, he shook his head, let his arms drop nervelessly upon his knees, and sat there dumbly asking that question which many a soul whose faith is firmer fixed than his has asked in hours less dark than this,—"Where is God?" I saw the tide had turned, and strenuously tried to keep this rudderless life-boat from slipping back into the whirlpool wherein it had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... could be demanded of her! What reason had she now to offer against her mother's desire? Letty's arguments were vain; they were but as the undisciplined motions of her own heart. Marriage with a worthy man must often have been salvation to a rudderless life; for was it not the ceremony which, after all, constituted ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... to work my Christian harm, I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm; I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw, And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw; I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark, I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark; I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil, And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... jammed on full speed, and nearly cleared it. It took them just at the stern and blew off about 30 feet as neatly as son would bite the end off a banana. The submarine heard the explosion, of course, from below, and came to the surface to see the "damned Yankee" sink, only to find the rudderless, sternless boat steaming full speed in a circle with her one remaining propeller, and to be greeted by a salvo of four-inch shells that made her duck promptly. The man killed saw the torpedo coming and ran aft to throw overboard ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... might have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe. It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment, and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond of attributing to George Washington, "Never trust a nigger with a gun." She found herself smiling over them. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... With a flicker of defiance Robert answered him. "I was young, rudderless, after my people went East.... ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... more to say. He keeps you standing half an hour. He talks a while longer. He assures you he really must go. You tell him not to hurry. He takes you at your word and sits down again. He talks some more. He rises again. He does not know even now how to conclude. He has no mental compass. He is a rudderless talker. ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... all the strength of a strong man. If it should fall upon him, where then would be his hope and outlook? His day would be done, his night would be closed in, he would be no more than a helpless log, rolling in an ice-bound sea, and when the thaw came—if it ever came—he would be only a broken, rudderless, sailless wreck. Sometimes he would swear at nothing and fling out his arms wildly, and then with a look of shame hang down his head and mutter, "No, ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... thank for health, for life and birth? She is born of the fire that burns in her own bosom. To her is nothing lawful nor unlawful. No tie binds her soul to salvation. A fair ship is she, but rudderless, and the wind blows on the rocks. Let God save ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... men of a certain type in this world whose judgment is exceedingly sound when their instincts are not in play, but who, in certain channels, when the senses are at riot, become puerile; the good ship, rudderless, which only rights itself when the storm has passed. They are men without the necessary leaven of introspection. Of themselves, in fact, they know nothing, learn nothing even in the remorse when the deed is done. For first of all, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... which have proved fatal fastnesses to women of other days. There remains no choice between these two alternatives: you must either found your conduct upon intelligence enlightened by faith, or abandon it, like a rudderless ship, to the caprice ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... how to confess if. Pethapt it was from shame, perhaps it was because Nora thought Coke to have little wit ; perhaps it was because Coke thought Nora to have little conscience. Their talk was mainly rudderless. From time to time Nora had an inspiration to come boldly at the point, but this inspiration was commonly defeated by, some extraordinary manifestation of Coke's incapacity. To her mind, then, it seemed like a proposition to ally herself ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... said he, dropping quaintly into the address of his childhood. "I'm just a rudderless boat staggering ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... innocent dowager; "and that's a very sensible remark! Were you at Bath last winter, Mr. Pelham?" continued the countess, whose thoughts wandered from subject to subject in the most rudderless manner. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... young man whose inner life is passion-swept, one tidal wave of fierce temptation, hot on the heels of the last, until all the moorings are snapped, and he driven rudderless out to sea—if he is to ride masterfully upon that sea ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... in the purest and foulest argot of Belleville—which is not in the French vocabulary of the doughboy. The animals at the pole caught fire of this madness and ran away in good earnest, that wretched barouche rolled and pitched like a rudderless shell in a crazy sea, the two men floundered in its well like fish ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Norse rowers steered the rudderless ships with their long oars, and with a mighty rush, through the new canal and over all the shallows, out into the great Norrstrom, or North Stream, as the Baltic Sea was called, the fleet passed in safety while the loud war-horns blew the notes ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... which the nation was drifting through sectional dissensions and avowed antagonism to the national authority, he chose as the opening metaphor of his reply to Hayne the description of a ship, drifting rudderless and helpless on the trackless ocean, exposed to perils both known and unknown. The orator knew his audience. To all New England the picture had the vivacity of life. The metaphors of the sea were on every tongue. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Confidence stands at the helm; Proudly she turns to the sea and walks like a queen on the waves. Caught in the grasp of the tempest, lashed by the fiends of the storm, Torn into shreds are her sails, tumbled her masts to the main; Rudderless, rolling she drives and groans in the grasp of the sea; Harbor or hope there is none; she goes to her grave in the brine: Dead in the fathomless slime lie the bones of the ship and her crew. Such was the promise of life; so is ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... getting up in a public room to announce that he 's a Republican, and writing heaps of mad letters to justify himself. He's ruined in his profession: hopeless! He can never get a ship: his career's cut short, he's a rudderless boat. A gentleman drifting to Bedlam, his uncle calls him. I call his treatment of Grancey Lespel anything but gentlemanly. This is the sort of fellow my girl worships! What can I do? I can't interdict the house to him: it would only make matters worse. Thank God, the fellow hangs ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thoughts, but the order or disorder of the story is that of the old wives' tales when the old wives are drowsy. All the principal situations occur twice over; twice the heroine is persecuted by a wicked mother-in-law, twice sent adrift in a rudderless boat, twice rescued from a churl, and so on. In this story the poetry of Chaucer appears as something almost independent of the structure of the plot; there has been no such process of design and reconstruction as in ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... before, but under the trees the gloom was too dense for profitable search. Moisture began to collect upon the leaf tips and to drip upon him. The dog did not answer to his whistle. There were no points of the compass; there was no view of the valley below. He was like a ship rudderless. He only knew of a surety that the earth was beneath his feet, and as night drew on, and he could no longer see the soil his boot-soles pressed, he only ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... his own, to share the good things Fortune had showered into his lap—to share them and be a crowning glory of them. The overthrow of this scheme at the moment of realisation upset his estimate of life in general and set him adrift and rudderless, in the hurricane of his first great reverse. Of selfish temperament, and doubly so by the accident of consistent success, the wintry wind of this calamity slew and then swept John Grimbal's common sense before it, like a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... tableland of security—those, that is, who are sure of making a respectable, if not a happy, living—and the submerged multitude who, through some lack in themselves, or owing to the conditions under which our strange civilisation has become organised, struggle rudderless till they die in workhouse, hospital, ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sank, and the waters darkened over his head, for he was encumbered by the weight of his clothes. At last he rose to the surface, gasping, and spitting out the brine, and though sore spent, he swam towards the raft, and hauled himself on board. There he sat clinging to the dismasted and rudderless vessel, which was tossed to and fro from wave to wave, as the winds of autumn sport with the light thistledown and drive ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... to him ungrateful and selfish, and yet all the mooring-ropes that held her little boat of life to the harbor of its simple religion seemed cut away, and she seemed drifting helpless and rudderless upon ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... citizens. The educational value of war must have been very great to bring Monroe to this conclusion, but Congress had not traveled so far. One by one Monroe's alternative plans were laid aside; and the country, like a rudderless ship, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and when once the storm of youth is past, Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death the ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... careless jests, forgive me." Merrihew now realized that his friend was in a bad way. Still, there was a hidden gladness in his heart that Hillard, always railing at his (Merrihew's) affairs, was in the same boat now, and rudderless at that. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... that the boat has been picked up and detained at a locality which he is in the daily habit of frequenting —at a locality, perhaps, which his duty compels him to frequent. The next night, without daring to ask for the rudder, he removes it. Now where is that rudderless boat? Let it be one of our first purposes to discover. With the first glimpse we obtain of it, the dawn of our success shall begin. This boat shall guide us, with a rapidity which will surprise even ourselves, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... remember that this is epistolary self-criticism, and that it is hardly to be looked upon in the nature of an 'advance notice.' Still more confidential and epistolary is the humorous and reckless affirmation that St. Ives is 'a rudderless hulk.' 'It's a pagoda,' says Stevenson in a letter dated September, 1894, 'and you can just feel—or I can feel—that it might have been a pleasant story if it had ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... felt lighter, the danger of congestion was over; but her protest was the keener and bitterer. Her father's life was safe in her hands, but she had no desire to return to his house. She determined to walk until morning, and to drift, rudderless, in the great ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... who, an hour before, could have gone through the whole of the arithmetic in his sleep. Oh, boasted intellect of man! How little is it thou canst do when the delicate and feeling heart is out of tune! How impotent thou art! How like a rudderless ship upon a stormy sea! Poor Burrage was helpless and adrift! And Michael sat for hours together alone, in his little room. He was literally afraid to creep out of it. He struggled to keep his mind steadily and composedly fixed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... the sea: But while I clung unto the helm, its guard ordained of right, And steered thee on, I chanced to fall, and so by very might 350 Seaward I dragged it down with me. By the rough seas I swear My heart, for any hap of mine, had no so great a fear As for thy ship; lest, rudderless, its master from it torn, Amid so great o'ertoppling seas it yet might fail forlorn. Three nights of storm I drifted on, 'neath wind and water's might, Over the sea-plain measureless; but with the fourth day's light There saw I Italy rise up from welter of the wave. Then ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... had never wholly quieted. It did not ease him any to know that he had left Jennie comfortably fixed, for it was always so plain to him that money was not the point at issue with her. Affection was what she craved. Without it she was like a rudderless boat on an endless sea, and he knew it. She needed him, and he was ashamed to think that his charity had not outweighed his sense of self-preservation and his desire for material advantage. To-day as the elevator carried him up to her room he was really sorry, though ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... England. The United States Senate rejected his nomination. This political insult secured much sympathy for him, and helped to make him President. "Hard-cider" was a party watchword during Harrison's campaign for the Presidency. "Rudderless"—Tyler often changed his political views, and finally turned against the United States Government, of which he had been Chief Executive. "Realm-extender"—during Polk's administration the United States ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... with storm-sails and by the ingenious expedient of filling the rigging with seamen; but in the fury of the gale, and in that sea, perturbed alike by the gigantic billows and the volleying discharges of the rivers, the rudderless ship drove down stern foremost into the inner basin; ranging, plunging, and striking like a frightened horse; drifting on destruction for herself and bringing it to others. Twice the Olga (still well under command) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reindeer in their ride along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and dances under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in this act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gown ride off upon the porker, down to the fight with the Boeig, gigantic gelatinous symbol of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... it most, lacked divine guidance; so drifted out on to the high seas of history pilotless and rudderless;—so Weltpolitik only corrupted and vulgarized her. She had no Blue Pearl of Laotse to render her immortal; no Confucian Doctrine of the Mean to keep her sober and straight; and hence it came that, though later a new start was made, and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Mine! I thought. And who was I that she should love me instead of him? All the years I had known him I had known but little of him. God only knows the hearts of these men who rove or drift, who, anchorless and rudderless, beat upon the ragged reels of life till the breath leaves them and they pass through the mystic channel into the serene harbor of eternity. A sudden wave of dissatisfaction swept over me. What had I done in the world to merit attention? What had ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath |
