"Rudderless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... deteriora sequor, confessed the Latin poet. Have we not seen men of the highest intelligence, gifted with foresight, quite capable of grasping the relation of means to ends, nevertheless subject to the baleful influence of momentary desires which drive them hither and thither like a rudderless bark at the mercy of the wind and tide? How does it happen that their intelligence does not ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... magnificent spirit besieged by contending forces. She stood like a mountain peak encircled with storm, like a beacon on a rock lashed by the fury of the maddening seas, like a ship in a valley of waves, rudderless, shroudless, with creaking ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... Judge: Arise, and to the seaside flee, as one That flies his foe. There shalt thou find a boat Made of one hide: eat nought, and nothing take Except one cloak alone: but in that boat Sit thou, and bear the sin-mark on thy brow, Facing the waves, oarless and rudderless; And bind the boat chain thrice around thy feet, And fling the key with strength into the main, Far as thou canst: and wheresoe'er the breath Of God shall waft thee, there till death abide Working the Will Divine." Then spake that chief, "I, that commanded others, can obey; Such lore ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... 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
... to the winds, he affirmed the constitutional right of Congress to draft 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
... felt myself in a most distracted, rudderless state. My mother's advice I felt daily less and less inclined to ask. A gulf was opening between us; we were moving in two different worlds, and she saw it, and imputed it to me as a sin; and was the more cold to me ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... rudderless age state and church are making desperate efforts to palliate the evils of nonreligion and its consequence, non-morality. In our own country we are multiplying state-provided nurseries, schools, playgrounds, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... it out, and calked the seams, taking plenty of time, and doing his work in the most thorough manner. He determined that after this was done, and he could find nothing better to do, he would split up the little vessel which the Rackbirds had left rudderless, mastless, and useless, and make ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... English! I've got Brian Boroihme in my pedigree and that's more than they can say! A pack of half-bred descendants of Cromwell's soldiers! That's what they are, and the best of them, too! That's the best drop of blood they've got!" Dick shouted, veering in the wind of his own words like a rudderless ship in a storm. "That's what gives them tenacity and bigotry! Look at the old places that they're squeezing the old families out of! It's the Protestant farmers and the Religious Orders that are getting them, swarming into them like rats! Don't tell me that I and my family ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Empress Dowager. A man knows, says the proverb, but a woman knows better. As a widow in early life, her lot is not quite so pleasant. It is not thought desirable for widows to remarry; but if she remains single, she becomes "a rudderless boat;" round which gathers much calumny. Many young women brave public opinion, and enter into second nuptials. If they are bent upon remarrying, runs the saying, they can no more be prevented than the sky ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and when once the storm of youth is past, Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death the silent pilot ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... and tinged with faint colors, that submerged his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus, into a void below—the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... Amherst, dressing by the gas-flame above his cheap wash-stand, strove to bring some order into his angry thoughts. It humbled him to feel his purpose tossing rudderless on unruly waves of emotion, yet strive as he would he could not regain a hold on it. The events of the last twenty-four hours had been too rapid and unexpected for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery; and he had, besides, to reckon ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... adrift, rudderless on a frightening sea, called her father into her bedroom at the Savoy and showed him the letter. He drew out and adjusted his round tortoise-shell-rimmed ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... breeze blew astern; 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 ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... crossed a few minutes 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 knew ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... tomb our best loved friends; we crouch and cower in awful fear of the time when we shall follow. We hear ever thrilling in our ears the quivering minor chord of human woe, voice of the burning heart-pain of the race, launched rudderless upon a troubled sea of woe, and undrowned even by the throbbing march-beats of the progression of man down the vista of the ages. And yet there is no death. This fear is only the terror of children frightened by ghosts of their own invention. What we dread has no existence ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... she would miss her as one misses a perfect mentor and guide. She had been used to looking to her for direction. She was thoroughly conscious that she had a will of her own and would like a chance to exercise it, still, she knew that in many cases without her stepmother she would be like a rudderless ship, a guideless traveller. And she loved her stepmother too, as a young girl can love a good woman who has been her guide and helper, even though there never has been great tenderness between them. Yes, she would miss ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to that one last ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... 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 upon the fate that awaited him—a fate which he had marked ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... with another world seldom knows much about this, and when Robert Browning tells of Sludge, the Medium, he symbols his opinion of all mediums. A medium, if sincere, is one who has abandoned his intellect and turned the bark of reason rudderless, adrift. This is entirely apart from the very common reinforcement of usual psychic powers with fraud, which, beginning in self-deception, puts out from port without papers and sails the sea with forged ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... had stood for something. He was a rudderless little craft that had come leaking and tumbling willy-nilly in the wake of the bigger vessel. But also he had been a sort of talisman. He had protected Robert as the weak, when they are humble and loving, can protect the strong, giving them greater confidence, making their defeat impossible. With ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... 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 ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... of others do we get any real idea of the trend of human thought. It is quite useless to start life with fixed standards, and try to bring everyone to realise their virtues. We must have some standard, it is true, or we should be as rudderless boats; but it is of paramount importance that our standards should be sufficiently elastic to include new movements; and not until we have tried and weighed in the balance, and considered and sifted the philosophies of others, should we attempt to form a philosophy ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... I saw the tide had turned, and strenuously tried to keep this rudderless lifeboat from slipping back into the whirlpool wherein it had been so ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... If I have hurt you with any of my 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
... part and died heroically like Roland and Corday. But set down in uneventful times, the courage, wit, and passion that might have served high ends dwindled to their baser counterparts, and made her what she was,—a fair allurement to the eyes of men, a born rival to the peace of women, a rudderless nature absolute as fate. ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... direction. Among others there was one running straight to the Australian continent, and its action is equally felt in the Atlantic and Pacific. It was doubtless against this that the BRITANNIA, dismasted and rudderless, had been unable to contend, and consequently been dashed against the coast, and broken ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... said he, dropping quaintly into the address of his childhood. "I'm just a rudderless boat staggering ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... personal insult from destiny. His associates here were especially a horse-dealer, called "Mug-sexton," because he does nothing but sing and drink all the time, and a disreputable, lanky, over-grown cross between a sailor and peddler, known and feared under the name of Peter "Rudderless," to say nothing of the fair Abelone. She, however, recently has had to give way to a brunette, belonging to a troupe of mountebanks, which for some time has favored us with performances of feats of strength ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... Frenchman, Montaigne, was a new, a strange, phenomenon in the eyes of Shakspere and his active and energetic countrymen. A man, a nobleman too, who lives for no higher aim; who allows himself to be driven about, rudderless, by his feelings and inclinations; who even boasts of this mental disposition of his, and sends a vain book about it into the world! What is it to teach? What good is it to do? It gives mere words, behind which there is no manly ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... sine ictu [Lat.], unfortified, indefensible, vincible, pregnable, untenable. paralytic, paralyzed; palsied, imbecile; nerveless, sinewless^, marrowless^, pithless^, lustless^; emasculate, disjointed; out of joint, out of gear; unnerved, unhinged; water-logged, on one's beam ends, rudderless; laid on one's back; done up, dead beat, exhausted, shattered, demoralized; graveled &c (in difficulty) 704; helpless, unfriended^, fatherless; without a leg to stand on, hors de combat [Fr.], laid on ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... With a flicker of defiance Robert answered him. "I was young, rudderless, after my people went East.... ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... husband of the goddess Gefjon, who created Zealand. Anglo-Saxon tradition also speaks of Scyld (i.e. Skildr), who was regarded as the ancestor of both the Danish and English royal families, and it represented him as coming as a child of unknown origin in a rudderless boat. There can be little doubt that from a remote antiquity Zealand had been a religious sanctuary, and very probably the god Nerthus was worshipped here by the Angli and other tribes as described in Tacitus (Germania, c. 40). The Lejre sanctuary was still in existence in the time ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... obvious. Love to God, resting on consciousness of His love to us, is the true armour. "There is no fear in love." The heart filled with it is strong to resist the pressure of outward disasters, while the empty heart is crushed like a deserted hulk by the grinding collision of the icebergs that drift rudderless on the wild wintry sea of life. Love, too, is the condition of hope. The patience and expectation of the latter must come from the present fruition of the sweetness of the former. Of these fair sisters, Love is the elder as the greater; it is she who bears ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... 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, no, Israel; no, ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... the rope of pearls which was tugging him back to his old ways. And when he looked at them he could not see Molly. The thing was symbolical. It must be one or the other. He was at the crossroads. The affair was becoming a civil war. He felt like a rudderless boat between two currents. Eight years of gem collecting do not leave a man without a deep-rooted passion for the sport. As for that steel box, that was all nonsense. It was probably quite a good steel box, and the lock might very well be something ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... life was dead. She had her boys, the sunsets and sunrises, the mellowing beauty of the year. She had her books, and above all her memories. And in these memories she found much to blame in herself, but much to pity, too. A rudderless little bark, she had been set adrift in so inviting, so welcoming a sea twenty years ago! She had known that she was beautiful, and that she must marry—what else? What more serious thought ever flitted through the brain of little Rachael Fairfax than that it ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... tossing main, where delirium drove Beryl's consciousness to and fro like a rudderless wreck, did some mysterious communion of spirits survive? Did some subtle mesmeric current telegraph her soul, that her foul wrongs were at last avenged? Whatever the cause, certainly a strangely clear, musical laugh broke suddenly from her lovely lips, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... boyish feeling that his father had had many things to say to him that never had been said; that these things were very wise and would have guided him. Jim felt rudderless. He felt that it was incumbent on him to do the things that his father had not been able to do. Vaguely and childishly he determined that he must make good for the Mannings and for Exham. Poor old Exham, with ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was not at the end of her troubles, but the voyage up to New Zealand need not be described in detail. Any attempt to reach McMurdo Sound was now out of the question. Stenhouse had a battered, rudderless ship, with only a few tons of coal left in the bunkers, and he struggled northward in heavy weather against persistent adverse winds and head seas. The jury-rudder needed constant nursing, and the shortage of coal made it impossible to get the best service from the engines. There were ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... for an instant and seemed to review and take account of what he had said. He was hopelessly adrift from the subject he had proposed to himself, launched for better or for worse upon the theme that was subliminal in him and had flowed up, on which he was launched, and almost rudderless, without construction and without control. The speech of his first intention, orderly, developed, was as far from him as the history of Liberalism in Fox County. For an instant he hesitated; and then, under the suggestion, no doubt, of that ancient misbehaviour in ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... at the Rocky Mountain city about the middle of the afternoon. And now, what to do? I think I am not a fool, but I certainly lack the training of a detective, and I felt perfectly rudderless and helpless as I ordered the taxi-driver to take ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... was appointed by Jackson as U. S. Minister to 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 acquired the territory embracing California, Arizona, New Mexico, and ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... the other works of Chopin which bear the same name. More than to any one of the master's scherzos, the name capriccio would be suitable to his third "Scherzo," Op. 39, with its capricious starts and changes, its rudderless drifting. Peevishness, a fierce scornfulness, and a fretful agitation, may be heard in these sounds, of jest and humour there is nothing perceptible. At any rate, the curled lip, as it were, contradicts the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the only voice you could hear. I do not therefore count the cost. My brother's brain so far overmatched my own that it first absorbed and finally destroyed my mental vitality. This influence removed, I am a rudderless ship at ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... population of which is thrice that of Great Britain and the United States together. The author of another book, published last year, delivers himself of this astonishing opinion: "The Japanese is no better fitted to direct his own agriculture than I am to steer a rudderless ship ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... hag-ridden souls in fear Through echoing, unearthly vales, To plunge in black, slow-crawling streams, Seeking to drown that cry, in vain ... Or some sea creature's voice that wails Through blind, white banks of fog unlifting To God-forgotten sailors drifting Rudderless to death ... And as I heard, Though no wind stirred, An icy breath Was in my hair ... And clutched my heart with cold despair ... But, as the wild song died away, There came a faltering break That shivered to a sobbing fall; And seemed half-human, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... 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 been so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker |
