"Drift away" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... because the loss of a boat may cause anger and, even if well disposed to the cause, they might not receive you well. However, I shall tie the boat up on the opposite bank when I leave it, so that it will not drift away down the river; and when they see it in the morning, they will only have to send another boat across to ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... to see my old friends any more or keep up with them. If anything happened to Lucy, I'd be absolutely alone in the world, except for the babies. A man does wrong to drift away from those who he knows by a thousand proofs care for him, on any pretext ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... understands public accounts. A man is asked to subscribe ten dollars to a church affair, who cannot afford it, but his spiritual insight might save the impending church quarrel. People come and go in the churches, and many, I am convinced, drift away because they are never asked for anything but money for the support and interest of the Church. In no other sort of organization is this true. Even in the summer camp or mountain hotel or Atlantic liner, when any pastime or entertainment is suggested, the first ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... if we are on the right track, Queenie?" he said, addressing his animal, as was his custom when they were alone. "It would be strange if we didn't drift away from our bearings. Hello! that can't be Dick Hawkridge's ranch; we haven't gone far enough for that; but what the mischief can it be, unless a fire that some one has started ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... a "specimen day." It is early morning, or to be more precise, about eight of the clock, and the white fog is just beginning to curl and drift away from the surface of the river. Sooner than this it would be idle to go out. The preternaturally early bird in his greedy haste may catch the worm; but the salmon never take the fly until the fog has lifted; and in this the scientific angler sees, with gratitude, a remarkable adaptation ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... first time, the Hassler missed her anchorage, and lay off the shore near an island, which afforded some protection from the wind. A forlorn hope was detailed to the shore, where a large fire was kept burning all night, that the vessel might not lose her bearings and drift away. In the morning all was right again, and she kept on her course to ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... companies in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company became the sole authority on the Pacific coast. Settlers straggled in slowly until, in the late fifties, the discovery of rich placer gold on the Fraser and later in the Cariboo brought tens of thousands of miners from Australia and California, only to drift away again almost as quickly when the sands began ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... unless you rode a cow and shot at a goat," Flint answered, and was rather relieved to have the conversation drift away on to the comparative merits, as hunting-grounds, of the different sections of the country. The subject was not specially exciting to Flint; but it was at least impersonal, and he felt an unaccountable aversion to hearing any ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... imagined—would fight their way up to it, panting great plumes of rocket smoke, and bringing food and fuel to its crew. And presently one of those panting small ships would refill its fuel tanks to the bursting point from the fuel other ships had brought—and yet the ship would have no weight. So it would drift away from the greater floating thing in space, and suddenly its rockets would spout flame and fumes, and it would head triumphantly out and away from Earth. And it would be the first vessel ever to strike out ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... time that his feverish eloquence brought tears and incoherent shoutings from the audience, he became suddenly fearful before the ecstasies which he had touched to life, he faltered, and brought his discourse to an abrupt end. As the crowd slowly quieted and reluctantly began to drift away there flashed on him with blinding suddenness the realization that his excitement had been as great as their own; for a moment he wondered if such passion were godly. Only for a moment, however, of course it was godly, as any rapture informed by religion must be. He was sorry he ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... did all the talking. We fell together, as modest people will, in the tail of the herd that was being shown through, and he at once began to say things which interested me. As he talked along, softly, pleasantly, flowingly, he seemed to drift away imperceptibly out of this world and time, and into some remote era and old forgotten country; and so he gradually wove such a spell about me that I seemed to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity, holding speech with a relic of it! Exactly as I would speak of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I fenced, drilled, saw my companions drift away into war, and knew not how to escape. I can now look back on my dismissal from Meeting with more regret than it gave my youth. I have never seen my way to a return to Friends; yet I am still apt to be spoken of ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Valois' stay at Lagunitas drift away. Old "Kaintuck" has plead in vain to go. He yields to Valois' orders not to dream of going with him. His martial heart is fired, but some one must watch the home. Padre Francois Ribaut has all the documents of the family, the marriage, and birth of the infant ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... who half his life had spent Toiling at ledgers in a city grey, Thinking that so his days would drift away With no lance broken in life's tournament: Yet ever 'twixt the books and his bright eyes The gleaming eagles of the legions came, And horsemen, charging under phantom skies, Went thundering past beneath ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... before she had time to throw herself after him she was seized and dragged into one of the boats. The boatmen were killed, the ferryboat left to drift away, and the Tartars continued to ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... to Rutland Road and its inhabitants; good-bye to England itself, it appeared, for at least a year to come, and at two-and-twenty a year is as long as a lifetime, if it divides us from those we love. She would drift away out of sight, and the last six months would become but an episode in her own life and ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... seals. Many of his comrades had started with him that day, but being a bold man, he had pushed beyond them all. When the gale came on the Esquimau hunters prepared to return home as fast as possible, fearing that the decaying ice might break up and drift away with them out to sea. Before starting they were alarmed to find that the seaward ice was actually in motion. It was on this ice that Annatock was employed; and his countrymen would fain have gone to warn him of his ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... noted the lack of heart in her manner. His eyes had flitted almost instantly to Miriam Arnold's, and there they hung. A few minutes of swift, purposeless chat ensued, Mrs. Stannard and Mrs. Sumter doing most of it. Then, somehow, three women seemed to drift away and become engrossed in matters of their own over by the Navajo-covered lounge, and then Miriam lifted up her eyes and looked one moment ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... cross the torrent by means of a few bits of gravel projecting above the water; then, failing to find bottom, the more reckless of the Ants are swept off their feet and, without loosing hold of their prizes, drift away, land on some shoal, regain the bank and renew their search for a ford. A few straws borne on the waters stop and become so many shaky bridges on which the Ants climb. Dry olive-leaves are converted into rafts, each with its load of passengers. The more venturesome, partly by their own efforts, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... a day the cattle, in twos and threes, in bands, in strings, could be seen winding leisurely down the deep-trodden and converging trails to the water troughs at the home ranch, there leisurely to drink, and then leisurely to drift away into the saffron and violet and amethyst distances of the desert. At ten other outlying ranches this daily scene was repeated. All these cattle belonged to the man, great by reason of his priority in the country, the balance ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... my Rose, good-bye; The wind is up; so; drift away. That songs from me as leaves from thee may fly, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... inglorious instead of famous, bankrupt instead of wealthy. For a city's wealth consists, I imagine, in allies, confidence, loyalty—and of all these you are bankrupt. {67} And because you are indifferent to these advantages, and let them drift away from you, he has become prosperous and powerful, and formidable to all, Hellenes and foreigners alike; while you are deserted and humbled, with a splendid profusion of commodities in your market, and a contemptible lack of all those things with which you should have been provided. ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... the pity of it, Edith brushed away a tear or two. She was not at all sleepy, but drew the blanket closer around her, for the night grew chill as the earth swept farther and farther away from the sun. The clouds had begun to drift away, and faintly, through the shadow, glimmered one pale star. Gradually, others came out, then a white and ghostly moon, with a veil of cloud about it, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... look for Sir Robert, whom she found walking about on deck. He had been reading all the afternoon, and his mind was full of La Salle, and De Soto, and poor Evangeline, so cruelly near to Gabriel and happiness once, only to drift away from both forever. So large was his grasp of any subject that the imaginative phases of a situation appealed to him as powerfully as the practical, and he was not the man to take the Mississippi without its associations, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... a great sight to see that splendid swordfish drift away from the boat—to watch him slowly discover that ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... ice in a glass of water at zero degrees Celsius exhibits certain properties and performs certain actions at its surface. Some of the molecules drift away, to become one with the liquid. Other molecules from the liquid become attached to the crystalline ice. But, the ice cube remains essentially an entity. Over a period of time, it may change slowly, since dissolution takes place faster than crystallization at the corners of the cube. Eventually, ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... him thoughtfully from under the edge of a verdigris-colored turban that matched the high collar of her walking suit. She was reluctant to let him drift away to some obscure, wretched fate, to which his native apathy would surely direct him. She perceived in him again a certain relationship to herself, a relationship due not only to his past good fortune, but also to something in his character—perhaps ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... drift away from mine. A touch of her new seriousness returned. She pointed to that thin ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... constant problems of the Church is that of the loss of those who have for a time been associated with it—of those who have for a time seemed to recognise their duty to God, and their privileges as members of His Son. They drift away into the world. We pray and meditate and worry over this and try to invent some machinery which will overcome it. But it cannot be overcome by machinery, especially by the sort of machinery which consists in transferring the amusements ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... wise enough to see that each canoe, before being abandoned there amidst the friendly rushes, was securely staked, so that it could not drift away, through the ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... old Jolyon—waiting for Irene to come to him across the lawn—had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically, whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better close his own eyes and drift away. There was something undignified in o parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein he regretted two things only—the long division between his father and himself when he was young, and the lateness of his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... human, listless, aimless as the green Idiot fishes of my aquarium, Who loiter down their dim tunnels and come And look at me and drift away, nought seen ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... through the trees ahead. You scarcely notice it till, on your right, a stir, and another cloud, and another—The caribou, quick, a score of them! But before your rifle is up and you have found the sights, the gray things melt into the gray woods and drift away; and the stalk ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... to strengthen the idea, now and then above the trees would burst what seemed a rocket of coloured stars. The stars would drift away in a flock on the wind and be lost. They were flights of birds. All-coloured birds peopled the trees below blue, scarlet, dove-coloured, bright of eye, but voiceless. From the reef you could see occasionally the seagulls rising here and there in clouds ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... found in the old colony of the Salzburgers. (600.) During Bergmann's long pastorate, which was conducted in the German language exclusively until 1824, the Americanized young people gradually began to drift away from the mother church. However, to the present day descendants of the Salzburgers are found in the Lutheran congregations of Savannah and of the ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... combined. Cancut the Unwearied roofed with boughs an old frame for drying moose-hides, while Iglesias sketched, and I worshipped Katahdin. Has my reader heard enough of it,—a hillock only six thousand feet high? We are soon to drift away, and owe it here as kindly a farewell as it gave us in that radiant twilight ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the ice moved out. This is the phrase that is always used along the lakes. The ice 'moves out' of every harbor from Ogdensburg to Duluth. You can see the great white floes drift away into the horizon, and the question comes, Where do they go? Do they meet out there the counter floes from the Canada side, and then do they all join hands and sink at a given signal to the bottom? Certainly, there is nothing ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... had begun to drift away, and I was presently left alone with Father Payne. "Now you come along of me!" he said to me; and when I got up, he took my arm in a pleasant fashion, led me to a big curtained archway at the far end of the hall, under the gallery, and along a flagged passage to the ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... family, but I thank you for your offer. In return for your courtesy, I warn you that my master's skiff is fast to the step of the house. It might be recognised. When you have killed me, you had better cast it off—it will drift away with ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... mouth. Affectionate and jolly, he was a fascinating companion for a voyage down the sparkling stream of life; only his boat was very small. There was room in it for a girl-partner at the oar, but no accommodation for passengers. He was allowed to drift away from the threshold of the Belgravian mansion while Winnie averted her tearful eyes. He was not a lodger. The lodger was Mr Verloc, indolent, and keeping late hours, sleepily jocular of a morning from under his bed-clothes, ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad |
