"Rubble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attracted considerable public attention while it was in progress, was the underpinning of a part of the Columbus Monument near the southwest entrance to Central Park. This handsome memorial column has a stone shaft rising about 75 feet above the street level and weighs about 700 tons. The rubble masonry foundation is 45 feet square and rests on a 2-foot course of concrete. The subway passes under its east side within 3 feet of its center, thus cutting out about three-tenths of the original support. At this place ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... did they get to the place where found? There was a good deal of discussion on the point and no very satisfactory solution offered. Cannot help thinking that there is something in the thought that the glacier may have been weighted down with rubble which finally disengaged itself and allowed the ice to rise. Such ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... in the most flourishing towns the houses were still mostly of wood or rubble covered with thatch, and only here and there was to be found a house of stone. So slight, indeed, were the ordinary buildings, that it was provided by the Assize of Clarendon that the houses of certain offenders should be carried ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... weed, and lighted it from the glowing tip of Mr. Treffry's cigar, by light of which his head and hat looked like some giant mushroom. Suddenly the wheels jolted on a rubble of loose stones; the carriage was swung sideways. The scared horses, straining asunder, leaped forward, and sped downwards, in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... standing firmly at the top of the southern gable. Sockets in the walls, on either side, where massive beams had once lodged, showed that the building had been in three stories, though all the floors had fallen in and made a mound of rubble in the centre of the hall where ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... any evidence of irrigation, either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one end of that mound ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... momentum, and its ruins had fallen down upon the Temple of Time, demolishing it and leaving only ruins. It had also fallen on a strip of the city, taking with it several buildings and leaving only rubble. The King, Wagner, and Bernibus could just barely be seen amongst the crowds that had dashed out of doors to see what was going on, and I could tell that Bernibus was smiling at my escape as he looked ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... a cascade which had raised its terrific roar for centuries. The cottage itself was built of old stones from the long dismantled Priory, scraps of tracery, moulded window-jambs, and arch-labels, being mixed in with the rubble of the walls. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... his apprenticeship; and to him he went accordingly. The business carried on by his new master was of a very humble sort. Telford, in his autobiography, states that most of the farmers' houses in the district then consisted of "one storey of mud walls, or rubble stones bedded in clay, and thatched with straw, rushes, or heather; the floors being of earth, and the fire in the middle, having a plastered creel chimney for the escape of the smoke; while, instead of windows, small openings in the thick mud ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... smouldering, and a faint smoke rising from this found egress through a crude chimney. This was built over the hearth, with two vertical side slabs of pumice supporting a perforated square flag, over which a primitive flue, made of rubble cemented by mud, led to a circular opening in the front wall of the cave. In a corner stood the frame for the grinding-slabs, or metates, and in it the three plates of lava on which the Indian crushes and pulverizes his maize ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... smile, pressed his lips to it, and then stooping down, he took a stick lying by the log, and scooped out a deep hole in the mossy, fibrous earth. Into it he dropped the ring, covering it again with all the leafy "rubble and wreck" of the wood. He covered his eyes for a ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... authorised to take any necessary measures, insolence and violence excepted—but the power of extraction that must have been employed in such a process excites very painful reflections. Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble-work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... interesting relic is on the left hand of Queen Victoria Street, going up from the bridge, just where there was formerly a picturesque but dangerous descent by a flight of break-neck stone steps. At the right-hand side of the same street stands an old rubble chalk wall, even older. It is just past the new house of the Bible Society, and seems to have formed part of the old City wall, which at first ended at Baynard Castle. The rampart advanced to Mountfiquet, and, lastly, to please and protect the Dominicans, was pushed forward outside Ludgate ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... situate to the right of the road, about twelve miles from Dieppe. I did not see Longueville, and I am told that the ruins are quite insignificant, yet I regret that I did not visit them. The French can never be made to believe that an old rubble wall is really and truly worth a day's journey: hence their reports respecting the notability of any given ruin can seldom be depended upon. And at least I should have had the satisfaction of ascertaining the actual state of the remains of a building, known to have been ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... halfway from its hinges. The thing made a second noise. Stones splintered and began to collapse. Hoddan admired. Three more unpleasing but not violently loud sounds. Half the wall on either side of the gate was rubble, collapsing partly inside and partly outside ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... the air with you to help the workers, who are building the wall; carry up rubble, strip yourself to mix the mortar, take up the hod, tumble down the ladder, an you like, post sentinels, keep the fire smouldering beneath the ashes, go round the walls, bell in hand,[279] and go to sleep up there yourself; ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... chocolate bar from his pocket, sat down on a piece of broken rubble and began to eat. "You're ...
— Operation Lorelie • William P. Salton
... outer face of the buildings there are no signs of mortar, the intervals between the beds being chinked with stones of the minutest thinness. The filling and backing are done in rubble masonry, the mortar presenting no indications of the presence of lime. The thickness of the main wall at base is within an inch or two of three feet; higher up, it is less, diminishing every story by retreating jogs ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... before he gained the summit, and the young women grew tired of sitting still in one place. Anna, true miner's daughter that she was, spied some scattered bits of carnelian in the rubble near by, and pointed them out to Blanka. Agate and chalcedony were also to be found among the loose stones, and often the three occurred together. Both Anna and her companion were soon busy gathering these treasures and pocketing the rarest specimens. Indeed, so intent were ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... would vary, but this would be his favourite plan. On the other hand, the rectangular chancel and western tower remained the favourite terminations of the parish church in England. But, while a large number of rubble-built, unbuttressed Norman towers, usually heightened or otherwise altered in the later middle ages, remain in many parts of England, their relation to the plan suffers some change. The ground floor of the Saxon tower ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... Smiles says—"A dead fish can float with the stream, but it takes a man to swim against it." What could be more noble than the start and the starter of Christianity? How beautiful the upward struggle of an idea, like some sweet flower blossoming out amongst rubble and cinders! But, alas! to say that this idea was a final idea! That this scheme of thought was above the reason! That this gentle philosopher was that supreme intelligence to which we cannot even imagine a personality without irreverence!—all this will come to ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... seems to dwell by natural predilection upon these high summits and in these unsounded depths. The flame of the passion in her burns at such quivering vibrant pressure that the fuel of it—the debris and rubble of our earth-instincts—is entirely absorbed and devoured. In her work the fire of life licks up, with its consuming tongue, every vestige of materiality in the thing upon which it feeds, and the lofty tremulous spires of its radiant burning ascend ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of Manhattan Island. The river-front buildings were destroyed in a single sweep, from north to south, of the ghastly ray. Farther back from the Hudson, however, after the water-front buildings had been reduced to mere piles of rubble, the most beautiful, most modern buildings were ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... ascending street was filled with rubble. She picked her way and peered into the ruins. At first she saw no one; the place seemed to be deserted. Then some one moved in a dark cellar, and as she stood at the top of the short flight of steps a very old woman came forward into the light. There were two children ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside. These led us round the farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a tremendous pile of rocks resting where he'd parked his car. One crumpled fender and a drunken headlight peeped out of the rubble. ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... trailed like rags and the dripping pendules of lime hung from the arches like dirty icicles, until he came to the foundation of the great tower. There he set down the lantern and began to dig, fiercely and silently, close to the corner-stone, throwing out the rubble with his bare hands. At last the pick broke through into a hollow niche. At the bottom of it was the skeleton of a child about five years old, and the cords that bound her little hands and feet lay in white dust ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... (about fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea) are composed almost entirely of granite rocks, with occasional tracts of quartz; and the surface is generally strewn over with a hard loose rubble. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... have disclosed a large part of the encircling wall. It was a construction of excellent workmanship which still stands practically intact, testifying to the accuracy of the early Hebrew tradition. Its foundation is a wall of rubble sixteen feet high and six to eight feet thick, sloping inward. On the top of this foundation, which rested on the native rock, was built a supplemental wall of burnt brick six or seven feet in thickness and rising even now in its ruined condition on an average ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... that it hath its growth and nourishment from the aire, for from the lime it can receive none. [In August 1847, I observed a large and venerable ash tree growing out of and united with the ancient Roman walls of Caistor, near Norwich. The whole of the base of the trunk was incorporated with bricks, rubble, and mortar; but the roots no doubt extended many yards into the adjacent soil.- J. ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... nature alone can do for a man. A character of nature's building is at best a very ragged affair, without religion's finishing hand; at the utmost a fine ruin no more. And if that be the utmost of nature's handiwork, what is at the other end of the scale? alas! the rubble stones of the ruin; what of good and fair nature had reared there was not strong enough to stand alone. But religion cannot work alike on every foundation; and the varieties are as many as the individuals. Sometimes ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... difficult to assign a use for certain areas which have been paved apparently with brick rubble, or, in more evident cases, by flatlaid bricks. Four such ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... of the work, between Stations 182 90 and 183 65, the rock was low, and provision had to be made for maintaining the yards to the north of the site. Therefore a rubble-masonry retaining wall was built, with the face about 2 ft. north of the face of the proposed concrete wall which was to be put in later. On the same side of the work, between Stations 188 24 and 188 46, the rock was exceedingly poor, and as a small frame house on the adjoining ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • B.F. Cresson, Jr
... the pockets of rock, among the perched bushes, cooed comfortably. To the left the large church of St. Mary rose into space, to keep close company with the Castle, above the heaped rubble of the town. Mrs. Dawes smiled brightly as she looked ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... took a long time for human beings to accept that our little piece of meteoric rubble wasn't the exact and absolute center of the Universe. It does appear that way, doesn't it? It may not take so long for a ...
— Egocentric Orbit • John Cory |
