"Wrecking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this right. And today the right to one's own is doubly under attack from the violence of laboring men, and the guile of those in positions of financial trust. The strikers who offer as an argument the burning of a mine or wrecking of a mill, and the directors who manipulate corporation accounts to pay unearned dividends, are both undermining the right of property. Against such counsels of force and fraud, the representatives of the common sense and funded wisdom of mankind are the middling rich. It ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... now been going on long enough to enable mankind to form approximately correct views about its vast extent and scale of operations, its sudden interference with commerce and all other helpful international intercourse, its unprecedented wrecking of family happiness and continuity, its wiping out, as it proceeds, of the accumulated savings of many former generations in structures, objects of art, and industrial capital, and the huge burdens it is likely to impose ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... my dear. I shan't die a day sooner for having made my will—and I shall die a deal more comfortably, knowing that you are provided for. I promised your mother that, as far as lay in my power, I would shield you from wrecking your life as she wrecked hers. And money—a secure little income of her own—is a very good sort of shield for a women. Four hundred's not enough to satisfy a mercenary individual, but it's enough to enable a woman to marry for love—and not for a home!" He spoke with a kind ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... he is wrecking his final chance to amount to anything that's practical? That, if he holds on here, he must keep within some sort of limits in the things he says? That, if he lets go this present opportunity, he'll turn into the worst of all things, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... heart is almost as severe a strain as the less poetic process of working on an empty stomach. On the morning after the failure of Esme's strategy and the wrecking of Hal's hopes, the young editor went to his office with a languid but bitter distaste for its demands. The first item in the late afternoon mail stung him to a fitter spirit, as a sharp blow will spur to his best efforts a courageous boxer. This was a packet, containing ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... very interested auditors. For Prescott's benefit Reade first sketched a brief outline of the troubles that had led up to the present, including an account of the wrecking of substantial portions of the retaining wall. Then he came down to the events ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... to secure employment from one of the most powerful trust companies on the continent to refuse to listen to "reason." It was almost incredible that he should be trying to save the road instead of wrecking it, when there was no money to be made out of saving a trolley line that had been marked for destruction from the day its first tie was laid. Kirkwood smiled coldly upon them and their attorneys when they passed from persuasions to threats. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... near wrecking himself on the quicksands of the romantic school. He had begun to quote from a speech delivered by Gouverneur Morris, on the right of deposit at New Orleans, and which he had spoken at college, and was near getting into a part of the subject that might not have ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... it was," laughed Frank, "and you came near wrecking us, too. The sand bag struck the tent, and carried it ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... accomplices, Scholz and Daeche, were convicted of conspiracy to attach explosive bombs to the rudders of vessels, with the intention of wrecking the same when at sea, and were sentenced, on May 9, 1916, to terms of eight, four and two years respectively, in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta. Dr. Herbert Kienzle and Max Breitung, who assisted Fay in procuring explosives, ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Augustin, most of them do not recognize such feelings in the "pagan savage." Moreover, while early Christianity, like all other religions, was an appeal to the broadly human feelings of mutual aid and sympathy, the Christian Church has aided the State in wrecking all standing institutions of mutual aid and support which were anterior to it, or developed outside of it; and, instead of the mutual aid which every savage considers as due to his kinsman, it has preached charity which bears a character of inspiration from above, and, accordingly, implies ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... was derailed, here in the flat land at the grade crossing. The thing had been done some time. The fire had been drawn from the engine; there was only a sputtering of steam. The passengers had been removed. A wrecking-car had come up from down the line. A telegrapher was setting up a little instrument on a box by the roadside. A lineman was climbing a pole to connect his wire. A track boss with a torch and a crew of men were coming up from an examination ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... steel-like spears and made its way down the nave, where it forced up the flagstones with powerful levers. It was a victorious revolt, it was revolutionary nature constructing barricades out of the overturned altars, and wrecking the church which had for centuries cast too deep a shadow over it. The other combatants had fallen back, and let the plants, the thyme and the lavender and the lichens, complete the overthrow of the building with their ceaseless little blows, their constant gnawing, which ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... essayed the feat, the end of the whip caught on a jutting piece of ice, and I was 'snatched' off the sledge in grand style, nearly wrecking it in my exit. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... the children rattle. They have had no chance to grow great enough for the places. The child gets the blame for making the wreck, even as Gussie was blamed for wrecking his father's plant, when the child is ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... even such of the officers as had hitherto indulged the hope of a favourable turn in our affairs, began at last reluctantly to entertain gloomy forebodings as to our future fate. Our force resembled a ship in danger of wrecking among rocks and shoals, for want of an able pilot to guide it safely through them. Even now, at the eleventh hour, had the helm of affairs been grasped by a hand competent to the important task, we might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... of her covetousness and ambition. And then, when the Sun-King looked with favour upon her opulent charms, when at last she saw the object of her ambition within reach, that husband of hers went very near to wrecking everything by his unreasonable behaviour. This preposterous marquis had the effrontery to dispute his wife with Jupiter, was so purblind as not to appreciate the honour the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... it, was a trade secret most carefully kept by the Phoenician merchants of Cadiz, who alone held the clue. So jealous were they of it that long afterwards, when the alternative route through Gaul had already drawn away much of its profitableness, we read of a Phoenician captain purposely wrecking his ship lest a Roman vessel in sight should follow to the port, and being indemnified by ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? So much good has not been done by one effort in all past time, as in the providence of God it is now your high privilege to do. May the vast future not have to lament ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... a sort of wrecking machine hired from the railroad company removed the Thing next day, and towed it off, but of course the strawberries were half ruined; next a man from the florist's in town came with directions to repair all damage to turf and ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... mistress. At one moment she is all sweetness, smiles and playfulness; at the next vivid and passionate. Even when she is at her loveliest there is always the possibility of sudden fury: of her rising in a rage, breaking the furniture, wrecking the house—yes, and perhaps winding her wicked cold arms about you in a ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... to say. The brakeman will go as fast as he can, but it will take some time to get the wrecking crew here with a new engine, and then it will take some time to get all the ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... drinking liquor gets so many people—either by wrecking their health or by fastening on them the habit they cannot stop. They fool themselves. They are perfectly well aware that their neighbors are drinking too much—but not themselves. Far be it from them not to have the will-power ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... the other. "It's not simply that Master Albert is wrecking his own life. I suppose that's his right, if he wants to. But it's what he can do to other people! It's his money, Dr. Vince! Just think of it, he has seven hundred thousand dollars a year! And he never earned a cent of it; and he doesn't know what to do with it! Doctor, you KNOW ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... Nan read aloud, Laura recounted excitedly to Nan how Dr. Prescott had found that Linda was responsible for the wrecking of the steam plant and that Linda's father would undoubtedly be asked to pay the bill ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... bull has been killed in High Street, Tonbridge, after wrecking several shop windows. It is thought that the animal had misread the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... that someone had torn up a rail in the night, evidently for the purpose of wrecking the train; so there came a detective to Jimmie, while he was working in the field, to cross-question him. They had Jimmie's record, and suspected him of knowing more than he would tell. "Aw, go to hell!" ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... meant these things for me. You are not acute enough to understand close reasoning. I could not show you that, for the sake of a few coins, which would do you only that harm which would come from their value in cheap whisky or beer, you might be wrecking the future of a soul that is awake. I simply tell you that I shall keep the clothing for myself. Perhaps you can understand that plain statement!" The brown eyes became resolute and piercing. "Even if I had money I would not pay you for these garments. Money ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... with the letter yet on the edge of the drop she called up again the entire situation, the identity of the stories, the jeopardizing—no, the wrecking—of her future career by this chance-thrown barrier in the way. Why hesitate, why procrastinate? Her thoughts came to her in a whirl. If she acted quickly now,—took the leap with shut eyes, reckless of result,—she ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... approaching the coast in thick fog, ran his ship at full speed onto the sands of Cape Cod. He was unable to back off; a rising wind and sea threw the steamer broadside to the beach, and here she churned a hole for herself from which a wrecking tug could ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... our having been in prison, our headquarters has never ceased being the mecca of many discouraged "inmates," when released. They come for money. They come for work. They come for spiritual encouragement to face life after the wrecking experience of imprisonment. Some regard us as "fellow prisoners." Others regard us as "friends ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... the log-wrecking party was landed, shortly after noon, near a fishing settlement of half a dozen forlorn-appearing huts that stood in an irregular row on the beach. A few slatternly women, and twice their number of wild-eyed children, were the sole occupants of the place, for its men were ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... offices? The answer's obvious, isn't it? The emotional centre of gravity's not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it's love, in our new one it's business. In America the real crime passionnel is a 'big steal'—there's more excitement in wrecking railways ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... and security of one state depended upon the enterprise and diligence of another. And the movement for international peace is the chance offspring of these new social forces, at once a protest and a warning against the wrecking of modern economic structures by ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... a bad man. Casey was made collector of New Orleans, and was allowed to hold the Republican convention in the custom-house, with United States soldiers guarding the doors and regulating the admissions. As he and his crew were wrecking the finances of the State, there was in 1872 a general combination against them of the better elements,—they preferred the name "Conservatives" to "Democrats,"—and they claimed to have elected their candidate, John McEnery, as governor. Warmouth, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... and bitterness in this answer, there was not deliberate cruelty. Raoul loved his lugger, next to Ghita, before all things on earth; and, in his eyes, the fault of wrecking her in a calm was to be classed among the unpardonable sins. Still, it was by no means a rare occurrence. Ships, like men, are often cast away by an excess of confidence; and our own coast, one of the safest in the known world for the prudent mariner ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... recall only the main points—how I proved that the common stock was actually worth less than two dollars a share, that the bonds were worth less than twenty-five dollars in the hundred, that both stock and bonds were illegal; my detailed recital of the crimes of Roebuck, Melville and Langdon in wrecking mining properties, in wrecking coal railways, in ejecting American labor and substituting helots from eastern Europe; how they had swindled and lied and bribed; how they had twisted the books of the companies, how they were planning ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... fleet to avoid endangering Lieutenant Hobson and his brave companions, who were supposed to be imprisoned in old Morro. Before the end of the second hour the "New York" and the "New Orleans" had succeeded in completely silencing Cayo Battery, dismantling the guns and wrecking the ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... complete wreck as a man could be. But something had to be done, so I finally told the despatcher that Nos. 21 and 22 were in the ditch, and he snapped back, "D—n it, I've been expecting it, and have ordered the wrecking outfit out from Watsego. You turn your red-light and hold everything that comes along. In the meantime go wake up the day man. I want an operator ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... ushered in worse ravings when Pickering lived over once more the horror of the train-wrecking, and then it took many strong arms to hold him in his bed. "Come on, Ben," he would shout, struggling hard; "leave him alone—we shall be caught—the fire! the fire!" until his strength died away, and he sank to ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... white man who settles down in one of the South Sea Islands and lives by trading with the natives for copra—the dried kernels of cocoanuts—pearl shells, and the sea slug Beche de mer; often living by wrecking, kidnapping the natives, or any nefarious scheme. Many of them have been drunken, unprincipled scoundrels, their ranks in the old days having been recruited from the convicts escaped from Botany Bay or ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... are signs of clearing again, but I don't like the look of things; this weather has been working up from the S.E. with all the symptoms of our pony-wrecking storm. Pray heaven we are not going to have this wretched snow in the worst part of the glacier to come. The lower part of this glacier is not very interesting, except from an ice point of view. Except Mount Kyffen, little bare rock is visible, and its structure ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Native he actually makes Egdon heath the most absorbing feature of the book. All the characters seem to take life and coloring from this heath, which has in it the potency of transforming characters and of wrecking lives. And in Tess the peaceful, rural scenes appear to accentuate the tragedy of the heroine's unavailing struggles against a fate that ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... convenient supply of dry fence-rails would furnish ample fuel to render the rails useless. In this way a good deal of the track was effectively broken up, and communication by rail from Corinth to the south entirely cut off. While we were still busy in wrecking the road, a dash was made at my right and rear by a squadron of Confederate cavalry. This was handsomely met by the reserve under Captain Archibald P. Campbell, of the Second Michigan, who, dismounting a portion of his command, received the enemy with such a volley from his ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... boat without a crew, but if he is armed he will be able to defend himself even if he is attacked. I don't know how many boats there were at La Dorada, but I would lay my life that Purvis took the precaution of sending them adrift or wrecking ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... original cost, one thousand dollars, and to its accruing interest, which is likely in time to aggregate several thousand dollars, it would indeed be bad enough, yet not nearly as much so as it is under the melancholy circumstances; for the money paid on account of the bond goes towards killing or wrecking its producers, if not those who produced this particular thousand dollars, yet others of their class to whom the world owes all of its wealth; therefore the thousand dollars which went into this bond has been devoted to the robbery of those who were robbed ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... a leisurely cruise for South America, where, in view of Japan's entry into the war, the German Admiral may have felt that he would secure a clearer field of operations and, with the aid of German-Americans, better facilities for supplies. After wrecking on their way the British wireless and cable station at Fanning Island, and looking into Samoa for stray British cruisers, the trio of ships were joined at Easter Island on October 14 by the Leipzig and also by the Dresden, which had fled ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... 'wild and violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are horsed. There is thus something ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... impregnable though all men had thought them, had yielded to the vehemence of Phorenice's attack. And, indeed, it was scarcely to be marvelled at. With all her genius spurred on to fury by the blow that had been struck at her by wrecking so fair a part of the city, the Empress would be no light adversary even for a strong place to resist, and the Sacred ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... has been said, engaged in "flattening" part of the jam about eight or ten rods below the face of it. When they finally understood that the affair was one of escape, they ran towards the jam, hoping to climb out. Then the crash came. They heard the roar of the waters, the wrecking of the timbers, they saw the logs bulge outwards in anticipation of the break. Immediately they turned and fled, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the eastward of it. But in avoiding Scylla they ran the risk of striking upon Charybdis; for the dangerous reefs of Eleuthera were fatal to many vessels. The chief industries of the islands before the war were the collection and exportation of sponges, corals, etc., and wrecking, to which was added, during the war, the lucrative trade of picking and stealing. The inhabitants may be classed as "amphibious," and are known among sailors by the generic name of "Conchs." The wharves of Nassau, during the war, were always piled high with cotton, and huge warehouses were ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... inauspiciously by a tremendous gale which swept across the Hampshire Downs, after doing no small mischief in the Channel, and wrecking a good many fine old oaks and beeches in the New Forest. It was only the tail of a storm which had been blowing furiously in Scotland and the north of England, and no one as yet knew the extent ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... was England's business in 1861. That the Irish question should defeat an understanding between ourselves and England would be, to quote what a gentleman who is at once a loyal Catholic and a loyal member of the British Government said to me, "wrecking the ship for ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... in the efforts to get the Anti-Vivisection Bill of 1876 passed without the wrecking amendments that were at the last minute added to it; after the Bill was passed in its mutilated state Miss Cobbe with a not unnatural impatience wrote to him and others saying that "the supporters of vivisection having refused to accept a reasonable compromise or to permit any line ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... "It must be simply wrecking their business," said the Poet to himself, as he walked to Bedford Row to see how the claim for disturbance was progressing. "It serves them right, though, for talking drains when I wanted to go ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... should have, which amounted to the same thing), we turned over to a builder the task of making them into something that would float and hold people and go. The resulting craft, after passing through a wrecking and some rebuilding, we called Gadabout. She was about fifty feet long and twelve feet wide over all, as the watermen say; and was propelled by twin screws, driven by two small gasoline engines. Though not a thing of beauty, yet, as ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... The wrecking of old Dobbins' house had remained a mystery. Some thought the rope had been cut, while others were of the opinion that it had broken because of the heavy ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... this trading nation, Who make it a business to buy us and sell us, Like 'Erie,' or 'Central,' or other such stocks; With care, when they bid for a very 'Miss Nancy,' That she's of a stock that the brokers call 'fancy,' Or else has a pocket 'chuck full of the rocks'— The rocks that are wrecking each day of their sailing, More fortunes than ever in ocean were swallowed; Where 'ventures' of marriage their victims impaling With mammon and mis'ry ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... suppressing all signs of my own perturbation, but we have in the Navy now a man who does not hesitate to overturn a court martial, and so I feared a re-opening of the Rock in the Baltic question, which might have meant the wrecking of my career. I had quite made up my mind, if the worst came to the worst, to go out West and become a cow-boy, but a passenger with whom I became acquainted on the 'Enthusiana' informed me, to my regret, that the cow-boy is largely a being of the past, to be met with only in the writings of Stewart ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... dragged out to an interminable length. No one spoke of the matter—the question of land in sight was not discussed. Some of the boys went back to poker. Others decided to be seasick, and subsequently wished for a storm and the consequent wrecking of the ship, with a watery death ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... produced at Leipzig, and shortly afterwards was given at Prague. It has not yet found its way to London. The scene is laid in Cornwall in the eighteenth century. The inhabitants of that wild coast, though fervent Methodists, live by 'wrecking,' in which they are encouraged by their minister. Thurza, the minister's faithless wife, alone protests against their cruelty and hypocrisy, and persuades her lover, a young fisherman, to light fires in order to warn mariners ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the windows of a train broken, in order that the German public might be fed on ridiculous lies about the destruction of Liverpool docks and the wrecking of "English industry." "English industry lies in ruins," said the Hamburger Nachrichten complacently. Marvellous paper! Just after reading its remarks, I was driving down the streets of the great industrial centre I had come to see—a town which the murderers of ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it is, Trevor, old chap," said Milton, with great solemnity, "there's a lunatic in the school. That's what I make of it. A lunatic whose form of madness is wrecking studies." ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... Antoinette, her magnificent saloons were crowded by those ever ready to worship at the shrine of wealth, and rank, and power. But, as the stormy days of the Revolution shed their gloom over France, and an infuriated populace were wrecking their vengeance upon the throne and the nobles, Madame du Barri, terrified by the scenes of violence daily occurring, prepared to fly from France. She invested enormous funds in England, and one dark night ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... leaders we can trust. Have you met a decent Home Ruler who trusts the present men? No. I knew you would say so. Such a man cannot be found in Ireland. Then why send them to Parliament, say you? That is just what you Englishmen do not understand. That is one of the points old Gladstone is wrecking the country on. You think it ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... moreover, are all heartless: they have no pity for distress, no horror of catastrophes, no joy in the happiness of the deserving. Brains in men advance a household to station; but brains in women divide it and are the wrecking of society. Fortunately Lady Wathin knew she could rally a powerful moral contingent, the aptitude of which for a one-minded cohesion enabled it to crush those fractional daughters of mischief. She was a really good woman ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the still small voice of God, that your obdurate will is wrong, that your narrow prejudices and morbid memories are all wrong and vain;—it will tell you that you cannot become the wife of this man, who would sacrifice you as a solace to his remaining years, without wrecking your happiness for life. Farewell, Mara Wallingford. There is one thing you can ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... the frightened horse sprang away at a half gallop. "If that's the case, John Castellan knows rather more than he ought to do, and, good Lord, if he knows that, he must know where Auriole is, and what's to stop him taking one of those infernal things of his up to Whernside, wrecking the house and the observatory, and taking her off with him to the uttermost ends of the earth if ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and the grimaces of Mme. Verdurin, in terrified anticipation of the wrecking of her nerves by Beethoven's music. "Idiot, liar!" he shouted, "and a creature like that imagines that she's fond of Art!" She would say to Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville, as she had so often done for himself: "You can ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... made Vane Maxwell drunk that morning at Oxford, in the hope of wrecking his career. You didn't do that, but you gained your end all the same, and your sin is just as great. How do I know this—how do we know it? I will tell you. Carol Vane, Mr. Maxwell's sister, and yours, went to your wedding. Carol recognised ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... four years Sir Hiram made numerous experiments with his aeroplane, but in 1894 it broke through the upper guard rail and turned itself over among the surrounding trees, wrecking itself badly. ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... misfortunes of the Entente did more than its foresight to bring that consummation to pass. In the main it was due to the gradual weakening and then the collapse of Russia, which first involved the ruin of Serbia and Rumania and the wrecking of our Balkan plans, and finally dissolved the Eastern front. There could have been no unity of command had Russia remained our predominant military partner; and even in the West it never comprised the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... "My God—if only I could see them! If only I could get in there, and watch them at their normal living. But it's always like this. The only glance we're permitted is at a stampede following the wrecking of a termitary. And that tells us no more about the real natures of the things than you could tell about the nature of normal men by watching their ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... impulse surged the crowd forward and he lost sight of them. Yet the memory of the woman's voice and the words she had said haunted him. War would mean that, then, the tearing apart of families, the wrecking of ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... old shipmate many of the incidents of my wandering life, until, one day, he suggested it might prove interesting to publish them. I was willing, could the work be made useful to my brother sailors, and those who might be thrown into the way of temptations like those which came so near wrecking all my hopes, both for this world, and that which is to come. We accordingly went to work between us, and the result is now laid before the world. I wish it understood, that this is literally my own story, logged ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Sinn Feiners. The policemen and soldiers, including General Lewis, who surrendered, were treated with courtesy, and not one of them wounded or insulted. Their wives and children were also carefully preserved from danger until the police "reprisals" in the Thurles neighbourhood—the wrecking of villages and the savage murders of young men—ended by producing equally ruthless "reprisals" on the other side. In Dublin, since the Dublin Metropolitan Police declined to go about armed, not one of them has been ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... and we decamped at 9.30 to a cottage half a mile back. Perhaps it is as well that we did so, for at 9.40 a big shell arrived through the roof and exploded in my late bedroom, tearing out the corner of the house wall and wrecking the stable; whilst nearly at the same moment another shell completely wrecked the house just opposite, where Ballard (commanding 15th Brigade R.F.A.) had been spending the night. He also had cleared out ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... Mitchell can't know all that goes on or she'd make some different arrangement. You feel in another element when you get into the hostel. It's 'do as you like and don't bother me so long as you don't go too far and aren't found out.' It might be all very well in the old days last year, but it's wrecking the show now. I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it with my ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... the head of the train where the wrecking timbers lay was John Eddring, who arrived on the early train from the city. By virtue of his office as agent of the personal injury department, he at once began to possess himself of such facts as might be of use later on. With face ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... in wrecking the Three Bar up to date," Deane said. "It's probable they see you're too strong ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... pieced out her income by acting as a nurse in the dull seasons, but her real occupation in life was attending to other people's business. She had a divine meddlesomeness. She was inquisitive after the fashion of a sympathetic arch-angel. It appalled her to see people wrecking their lives by indecision, vacillation, incapacity, by poor judgment and crass stupidity. Her homely wisdom, the fruit of observant years, her native common sense, her strength and discernment were all at the service of the first comer. Responsibility, the bugbear ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... same year (1660) the central spire, which had been injured by lightning in 1593, fell through the roof, wrecking many of the beautiful canopies of the stalls. The damage to the choir and other parts of the church, estimated at L6000, was repaired with money raised under a brief from Charles II., but the spire was ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... won't?" and out rattled from its scabbard the old worthy's sword. "Come back, I say, you loafing, miching, wrecking crow-keepers; there are no pickings for you here. Brown, send those fellows back with the bayonet. None but blue-jackets allowed on the beach!" And the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... affairs? Who are you to assume the right of inquisitor?" He shook his head. "But I'm not going to. Now I'm sane again I know just how much you did for me. I meant killing Laval. Oh, yes, there wasn't a thing going to break my hold until he was dead—dead. You got me in time to save me from wrecking my whole life. And you got in at—the risk of your own. If I'd killed him all the things and purposes I've worried with since I left college would have been just so much junk; and I'd have drifted into the life of a bum lumber-jack without any sort of notion beyond ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... When darkness came the wrecking crew worked on by the light of lamps, lanterns, and candles, for the inducement of double pay ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... freight train on the Santa Fe railroad was delayed four hours last Saturday by a corn-stalk in Jake Schlosser's field, which had been undermined by hogs, falling across the track. It was removed with a crane and considerable difficulty by the wrecking crew. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... more than one person now under this unhappy roof would be wrecked. He knew it was late—that she had been obliged to take a long and dreary ride alone, but her success with the problem which had once come near wrecking his own life had emboldened him to telephone to the office and—"But you are in ball-dress," he cried in amazement. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... coolly as in a dream, to the most novel responsibilities. One sits on court-martial, for instance, and decides on the life of a fellow-creature, without being asked any inconvenient questions as to previous knowledge of Blackstone; and after such an experience, shall one shrink from wrecking a steamer or two in the cause of the nation? So I placidly accepted my naval establishment, as if it were a new form of boat-club, and looked over the charts, balancing between one river and another, as if deciding whether to pull up or down Lake Quinsigamond. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... from some passing guard, and, shouldering it, stamped solemnly after the shouting columns of halberdiers which were, by this time, parading the streets. He had, however, nothing to do with the wrecking of the statue of General Wilson, which ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... to possess and enjoy, that extraordinary perversion set in, growing worse and worse each day, and changing Bernadette's peaceful Bethlehem into a perfect Sodom or Gomorrah. Father Sempe had ensured the triumph of his Divinity by spreading human abominations all around and wrecking thousands of souls. Gigantic buildings rose from the ground, five or six millions of francs had already been expended, everything being sacrificed to the stern determination to leave the poor parish out in the cold and keep the entire plunder for self ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Christianity. If any of you are building upon the notion that a man can come into loving and familiar friendship with God as long as he loves and cleaves to any sin, you have got hold of a delusion that will wreck your souls yet,—is, indeed, harming, wrecking them now, and will finally destroy them if you do not got rid of it. Let us always remember that the declaration of my first text lies at the very foundation of the declaration ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... simply to Jesus, the meek and gentle—the Redeemer, who died that his blood might cleanse our sin-stained souls. Centre your aspirations upon Him, for He is the rock of our salvation, if we believe, or the rock of our wrecking to endless torment if we disbelieve. Do not deny our God who is Jesus, nor disown Jesus who is our God, nor yet question the inerrance of Holy Writ—yea, with its everlasting burnings. "He that believeth and is baptised shall ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... with the supervisor of the assembly groups, ordering supplies and machinery as they were needed from the wrecking crews and seeing that they were sent to the right place at the right time. One of his first jobs was the assembling of materials for the construction of the Administration Building of the colony. Less than five days after the foundation had been dug, the ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... which verges only too closely upon piracy. The intricate navigation of these waters, dotted by hundreds of small reefs and islands, and which can be traversed by only three safe channels, has furnished in former years a large amount of shipwrecked merchandise to Nassau. The wrecking business at best is extremely demoralizing, unfitting any community of men for legitimate industry, as we know very well by the experience gained on our own Florida shore. Men who have cruised fruitlessly for months in search of a profitable wreck will ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... dignify them with handsome epithets; but while they were here I had moments of thinking they looked like a lot of whited locomotives, which had broken through from some trestle, in a recent accident, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train. The poetry of the man-of-war still clings to the "three-decker out of the foam" of the past; it is too soon yet for it to have cast a mischievous halo about the modern battle-ship; and I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... way, and it was boldly carried out." As may be supposed, the bold decision ended with a crash. The whole time of descending the four and a quarter miles was a quarter of an hour, the last two miles taking four minutes only. For all that, there was no penalty beyond a few bruises and the wrecking of the instruments, and when land was reached there was no rebound; the balloon simply lay inert hard by the margin of the sea. This terrific experience in its salient details is strangely similar to that ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... was time to make my position clear. 'I'm an utter duffer at sailing,' I began. 'You'll have a lot to teach me, or one of these days I shall be wrecking you. You see, there's always been a crew—'Crew!'—with sovereign contempt—'why, the whole fun of the thing ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... be in his own family or himself. And what romance can be fuller of interest than the story of this hunted handful of Protestants leaving, some of them at an hour's warning, all that was dear to them, and voluntarily wrecking themselves, as it were, on this shore, where the savage and the wolf were waiting ready to dispute possession with the feeble intruders. They came with their untrained skill to a region where trees were to be felled, wild beasts to be slain, the soil to be subdued to furnish them bread, the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... which he had set the full strength of his talents, and life had tempered his impetuous nature with much philosophy. Moreover, while his conscience might ignore the double dealing necessary to the accomplishment of patriotic or political acts, it revolted at the idea of outwitting, possibly wrecking, his trusting and hospitable host. But the mere fact that his imagination could dwell upon such an issue as reckless flight, inflamed his impatience, and his desire to see Concha daily during these last ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... pitchfork; post hole digger. [powered construction vehicles] tractor, steamshovel, backhoe, fork lift, earth mover, dump truck, bulldozer, grader, caterpillar, trench digger, steamroller; pile driver; crane, wrecking crane. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... parties who had attempted the passage through the canyons above. Less than half of these parties, excepting Galloway's several successful trips, succeeded in getting through Cataract Canyon without wrecking ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... pig-headed young marplots! I'm in British service! You're wrecking the work of years—and on the very threshold ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... "Stop wrecking the furniture," exclaimed Billie, from her corner. "And do stop talking all at once. You make my ears ache. And besides, I want ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universe seems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as well be called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle between two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of the machines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no souls in them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that they collide and destroy each other like masses of matter in space. Nothing can be said ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... as he floated across the room, deliberately disregarding the strategically-placed hand-grips on the walls, floor, and ceiling. It seemed aeons before he reached the narrow little control compartment, and got the ultra-wave radio into action, nearly wrecking it ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... comfort in a good home, and his foster-parents seem to have loved him and to have been ambitious for his future. He was an erratic boy, and was soon to get into the first of those difficulties which ended by wrecking his life. For, entering the University of Virginia, he made the mistake of associating with a fast set, with whom he had no business, and ended by losing heavy sums of money, which he was, of course, unable to pay, and which his foster-father very ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson |
