"Boomerang" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the army, whose lapses caused defeat. Not that I object to these Fast-Day resolutions. I believe that I can still struggle onward in life, even under the contempt of their authors. But partisanship in matters of history is a boomerang which always flies back to whack its thrower. And Fast Day's performance ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... highest degree. He wrote a letter on the subject to the Chanticleer, a newspaper in Troy, Ill., of which he was a correspondent, and it was copied, with zinco-type illustrations, into all the journals of the habitable globe, and came back to England like the fabled boomerang. Meanwhile SWEZEY was cruising about, in town and country, looking out for persons wearing silver gridirons. He never found any, and the more he inquired, the more puzzled he became. He was informed that a treatise on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government, that threatened all ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... word out of his mouth. "News!" he roared. "A fake story ten years old, news? That ain't news! It's spite work. Even your dirty paper, Waldemar, wouldn't rake that kind of muck up after ten years. It'd be a boomerang. You'll have to put up a stronger line of blackmail and ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... darts hither and thither, even the tints appear to be those of a real dragon-fly; and even the sound of the flitting toy imitates the dragon-fly's hum. The principle of this pretty invention is much like that of the boomerang; and an expert can make his tombo, after flying across a large room, return into his hand. All the tombo sold, however, are not as good as this one; we have been lucky. Price, one-tenth of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... labour of an intellectual kind is enormous. The invention, construction, and working of one Krupp gun, though its mere discharge hardly demands more crude muscular exertion than a savage expends in throwing his boomerang, yet represents an infinitude of intellectual care and thought, far greater than that which went to the shaping of all the weapons of a primitive army. Above all, in the domain of politics and government, where once a king or queen, aided by a handful of councillors, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... may add that in my travels in Turkestan I was attacked by a boa-constrictor, and, though I escaped with my life, it proceeded to swallow the Bactrian camel on which I was riding. On the following day, however, when the boa was still in a comatose condition, I killed it with a boomerang, rescued the camel and continued my journey without ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... of Nerves" against the United Nations is now turning into a boomerang. For the first time, the Nazi propaganda machine is on the defensive. They begin to apologize to their own people for the repulse of their vast forces at Stalingrad, and for the enormous casualties they are suffering. They are compelled ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... mob and tried to make them understand by signs that we had peaceable intentions towards them, but they from his account seemed fully bent on having us off the ground. When he was returning to the camp Jemmy saw one of the blacks hold his boomerang as if he intended throwing it at Mr. Campbell, but he was probably advised by others not to do so. I am not surprised that they were vexed, as we would not allow them to come up to the camp, although they showed a bunch of hawk feathers ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... necessary to dispose of the illusion that they were actually rejects from some old-time camp. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the original design was copied from this elemental model, as, in like manner the boomerang is traceable to a leaf? The pattern is so profoundly persistent in the minds of the blacks of to-day, that in fashioning a hook from a piece of straight wire they invariably form a crescent, though the superiority of the shape approved by civilisation ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... man of the whole Bar T outfit who had suffered from the boomerang of his evil plans. It had been through him that Larkin was forced to accompany Bissell home after the stampede; and now he passed days and nights of misery, watching the progress of Bud's very evident suit. Chained ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... they play their game for the sake of the game, not to gain the plaudits of an idle crowd or in expectation of reward. Rivalry there undoubtedly is among them, but the rivalry is disinterested. No chaplet of olive-leaves or parsley decorates the brow of him who so throws the boomerang that it accomplishes the farthest and most complicated flight. As the archers of old England practised their sport, so do the blacks exhibit their strength and skill, not as the modern lover of football, who pays others to play for his amusement, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... (the boomerang of Eastern and kiley of Western Australia) is another simple but destructive weapon, in the hands of the native. It consists of a thin, flat, curved piece of hard wood, about two feet long, made out of the acacia pendula or gum-scrub, the raspberry-jam ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... discover the value of a chipped or wetted stone, or an angular piece of native metal, for the same object. On the other hand, it may be doubted whether the chances are not greatly against independent peoples arriving at the manufacture of a boomerang, or of a bow; which last, if one comes to think of it, is a rather complicated apparatus; and the tracing of the distribution of inventions as complex as these, and of such strange customs as betel-chewing and tobacco-smoking, may afford valuable ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... verandas, with barns for grain, vineyards, gardens, fruit-trees, etc. We might also expect, since man is a fighting animal, to see, as we do, pictures of marching troops, armed with spears and shields, bows, slings, daggers, axes, maces, and the boomerang; or to notice coats of mail, standards, war-chariots; or to find the assault of forts by means of scaling-ladders. But these ancient tombs also exhibit to us scenes of domestic life and manners which would ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... black joined, showing his white teeth with childish delight as he came close up, holding out something hung on the end of his spear, and carrying what appeared to be a bag made of bark in his left hand, in company with his boomerang, his war-club being stuck in the skin loin-cloth which was the only ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... arrows, two lances, sword and shield. In Firdusi's Book of Kings we read that the lasso was also a favorite weapon. Hawking was well known to the Persians more than 900 years ago. Book of Kabus XVIII. p. 495. The boomerang was used in catching birds as well by the Persians as by the ancient Egyptians and the present savage ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... My boomerang Warrangandya Second Person Thy boomerang Warranganyee Third Person His ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... beaching itself straight and swift at his feet, and so suddenly that he had to withdraw them like a flash to avoid the crunch of the sharp bows across the sand. 'Always let the other man speak first,' he thought; 'this boomerang of a boat has a shape in ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... familiarly known as "Bill"—Nye's unceremonious introduction to Field's friendship. This followed upon what was virtually the discovery of Nye by Field. The former was what old-time printers described as "plugging along" without recognition on the Laramie Boomerang. His peculiar humor caught the attention of Field, who, with the intuition of a born journalist, wrote and got Nye to contribute a weekly letter to the Tribune. At first Nye was paid the princely stipend ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... "Use your head a little more; that's what it's for. A man that hops his horses as often as you do can't afford to start any investigations along that line. If you must throw something at Curry, throw a brick, not a boomerang.... And somehow I don't believe it's hop. Fairfax was probably a good horse all the time, but Jimmy Miles didn't know it; and, as for training, Jimmy couldn't train a goat for a butting contest, let alone a thoroughbred for ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... some of them throw pebbles would lead us to believe they have already reached the degree of civilisation that many tribes of savages had reached only a few years ago, when they learned to use the boomerang and lasso. Some naturalists claim that monkeys actually set pitfalls for their enemies and lie in wait for them to be caught, just ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... or substitute for precision. It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... how to talk," said the Governor. "He brought my heart up in my mouth as no one has done in years. Now, I must get word to some of the people in New York to find out who he is, and if this case has any concealed boomerang in it." ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... dugout indescribably slack; hardly energy to struggle against the heat and the myriads of flies. I came out of it radiant. The Turks are beat. Five lines of their best trenches carried (or, at least, four regular lines plus a bit extra); the Boomerang Redoubt rushed, and in two successive attacks we have advanced 1,000 yards. Our losses are said to be moderate. The dreaded Boomerang collapsed and was stormed with hardly a casualty. This was owing partly to the two trench mortars lent us by the French and partly to the extraordinary ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... Howitt, after many years' observation in Australia, reports that the boomerang, though a singular, is not the marvellous instrument which we are told of in some books of travel; especially does he deny it the power of continuing its flight after striking its object, and also the ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Buck Denham, and as he shouted he snatched off Dean's hat and sent it skimming like a boomerang right away over the bushes, though, unlike a boomerang, it did ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... the case of Angelo. No one could demonstrate it, no one could with safety even hint at it; any charge that the court was anything but impartial would prove a boomerang to the defense; and yet the facts remained that the whole proceeding from start to finish had been conducted unfairly and with illegality, that the jury had been duped and deceived, and that the pretense that the guilty Angelo had been given an impartial trial was a farce. Every word of the ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... BOOMERANG, a missile of hard curved wood used by the Australian aborigines of 21/2 ft. long; a deadly weapon, so constructed that, though thrown forward, it takes a whirling course upwards till it stops, when it returns with a swoop and falls in the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Boomerang! Keep to' feet a-movin' an' we sho' will make a record. 'Tain't laik we was a autermobiler, er a electricity car, but we sho' hab been goin' sence we started. Yo' sho' done yo'se'f proud t'day, Boomerang, an' I'se gwine ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... another place called Antipataringa, where the mythical snake is said to have halted in his wanderings. The same two men acted as before, but this time one of them carried on his head a curious curved bundle shaped like an enormous boomerang. It was made of grass-stalks bound together with human hair-string and decorated with white down. This sacred object represented the Wollunqua himself.[138] From this spot the snake was believed to have travelled on to another place called Tjunguniari, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... form, it would be easier to combat them; but they are unformulated, nebulous. Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine what measure of oppression could possibly be invented by the most malignant Irish Government which would not recoil like a boomerang upon those in whose supposed interests it was framed. I shall have to deal with this point again in discussing taxation, and need here only remind the reader that Ulster is not a Province, any part of which could possibly be injured by any form of taxation which did not ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... a boomerang, was really the work of Colonel Lewis Cass, his Chief of Staff; but while Hull and Cass were "unloading their rhetoric at Sandwich," our hero was ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... the tolerant hearers. This is all very well in farce, but such anti-climax becomes painful when the speaker falls from the sublime to the ridiculous quite unintentionally. The pause, to be effective in some other manner than in that of the boomerang, must precede or follow a thought that is really worth while, or at least an idea whose bearing upon the rest of the speech ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and a ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... form of shell-fish which could be gathered near the shores of lakes and streams. Probably small game was secured by the use of stones and sticks and by running the animal down until he was exhausted or until he hid in a place inaccessible to the pursuer. The {87} boomerang, as used by the Australians in killing game, may have been an early product of the people of Neolithic Europe. In the latter part of the Paleolithic Age, fish-hooks of bone were used, and probably snares invented ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and relit my pipe. The tobacco I had purchased in Paris, and it was of the customary vileness. Perhaps I could smoke out Mein Herr. But the task resulted in a boomerang. He drew out a huge china pipe and began smoking tobacco which was even viler than mine, if that could be possible. Soon I let down ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... tribes bearing a totally different meaning. Many words, too, have been introduced which the blacks think are English, and the English think are native. Such, for example, as piccaninny, and, as far as these outside blacks are concerned, boomerang is regarded as English, their local word being burren; yet nine out of ten people whom you meet think both are local ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... wonder how it would feel to starve to death down there, and to wish poor Billy could come to share his prison, that they might die together, like the Babes in the Wood, or better still the Boy Scouts lost on the prairies in that thrilling story, "Bill Boomerang, the Wild Hunter of ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... disposition, but also by his apparent and deliberate sincerity. And while it was true that she had determined upon a method which was originally intended to redound to her own advantage, she soon learned that she was playing with a boomerang which soon put her upon the defensive against the very strategy which ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... other women were all heavily-laden, some with wood, and others with burdens of various sorts, their lords and masters condescending to carry nothing but a couple of light wooden spears, a waddy, or native club, and a boomerang. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... heard from one of the sentries. The men stooping round the fire leaped to their feet, just in time to see one of the constables struck from his horse by a boomerang, while a dozen spears whizzed through the air at the other. He fell forward on his horse, which carried him up to the fire; as he fell from the saddle, as it stopped, he was caught by two of the others. Three ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... buying a ready-made house. Still, I must admit that on the whole she behaved extraordinarily well under these trying circumstances, and said nothing more tart than that, if she ever were so foolish as to move again, she should insist on building a house to suit herself; which struck me as rather a boomerang of a speech, seeing that it implied a lurking doubt on her part as to whether she had been wise in moving at all. I even came near admitting to her in consequence that I was thankful we had moved, and that, surface indications to the contrary notwithstanding, I was ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... stars by the names of men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial things, it is true, everyone can behold in the heavens. Corona, for example, is like a crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it is like a boomerang, and we can understand why they give it the name of that curious curved missile. The Milky Way, again, does resemble a path in the sky; our English ancestors called it Watling Street—the path of the Watlings, mythical giants—and Bushmen ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... ounce of brains! Hard is the job to launch the desperate pun, A pun-job dangerous as the Indian one. Turned by the current of some stronger wit Back from the object that you mean to hit, Like the strange missile which the Australian throws, Your verbal boomerang slaps you on the nose. One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt, One trivial letter ruins all, left out; A knot can choke a felon into clay, A not will save him, spelt without the k; The smallest ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... armed with long lances and a piece of wood shaped like a scimitar. This was the famous "boomerang," so effective a weapon in the hands of the natives, so useless in that ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... translation here given makes no profession of absolute, verbal literalness. One can not transfer a metaphor bodily, head and horns, from one speech to another. The European had to invent a new name for the boomerang or accept the name by which the Australian called it. The Frenchman, struggling with the English language, told a lady he was gangrened, he meant he was mortified. The cry for literalism is the cry for an impossibility; ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the sort of a weapon you suspect," thought Mitchell. "This is a boomerang." Aloud, he answered, lightly: "Oh, that's all right. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... on reading any fiction except that in the news columns of the evening paper, which a boy threw on the porch in a twisted boomerang every afternoon, and which Eddie untwisted and read after he had wiped the dishes ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... control is subject to a popular vote, is a boomerang. The appointment of a citizen in a town arouses the anger of many others who think they are more deserving. I appealed to the farmers with the simple question whether old Westchester should be controlled by federal authority ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... Massa Tom, dat's all. Po' Boomerang he's gittin' old jest same laik I be. He's gittin' old, an' he needs lots ob 'tention. He has t' hab mo' oats dan usual, Massa Tom, an' he doan't feel 'em laik he uster, ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... set—merciless to one another, to their masters when they had a chance, to animals, to birds. The desire to torture was in nearly all of them. They loved to bully, and if they bullied only mildly, it was from fear, not from love. They did not wish their boomerang to return and slay them. If a boy were deformed, they twitted him. If a master were kind, or gentle, or shy, they made his life as intolerable as they could. If an animal or a bird came into their power, they had no pity. I was like the rest; indeed, ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... certain animals and birds, no description need be given, as this method of trapping is only to be performed by a person trained from childhood to ride and throw the lasso. The same remark applies to the use of the blowpipe (see Bates's "Amazons"), and the Australian "boomerang" and "throwstick." ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... too, standin' three hands higher than the tallest of our ponies. Also, it has a ewe neck an' lib'ral legs. It's name is 'Henry of Navarre,' but we sees at once that sech'll never do, an' re-christens him 'Boomerang Bob.' ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... goods; he made his offer; whereat the wild man swung his boomerang disagreeably, and indicated that he must have "more, more." Tears of self-pity flooded Sinkum's eyes. He had no choice but to obey, and at last the black-fellow left with a sack containing ten times the value of the goods the storeman had been forced to buy. He had been cheated, cruelly used; he ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... heads. Africa is a negress, with the characteristic grass-rope basket containing dates. North America is an Indian, but the civilization of the land is indicated by an anchor, beehive and cog-wheel. Australia is a gin, with a waddy, boomerang and kangaroo. South America sits on a cotton-bale, has a condor by her side, and at her feet are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... There is often a valid excuse for murder; there is none for nonsense rhymes. They seem to be a necessary evil to be classed with smallpox, chicken-pox, yellow fever and other irruptive diseases. They are also on the order of the boomerang and eventually rebound and inflict much suffering on the unlucky verse-slinger. So you see nonsense, like a little learning is a dangerous thing and should be handled with as much care as the shotgun which is never known ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... raised him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps, into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution has really been most ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the return of the eye over its course, as in circular observation, is practically eliminated. While the circle and ellipse offer a succession of items and events, one the sequence of the other, so that the vision concludes like a boomerang, angular composition sends a shaft ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... mah mule Boomerang, Massa Tom, dat's all. Po' Boomerang he's gittin' old jest same laik I be. He's gittin' old, an' he needs lots ob 'tention. He has t' hab mo' oats dan usual, Massa Tom, an' he doan't feel 'em laik he uster, ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... Miss Patsy, when she read this circular. "If I'm not much mistaken, Mr. Hopkins has thrown a boomerang. Every woman who attended the fete is now linked with us as an ally, and every one of them will resent this ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... husband's back ran counter to his wishes, fanned the flame of fanaticism, and brought about the crash which ruined his career! Was there ever a more improbable charge? But the accusation has overshot the mark, and, like the boomerang, it returns and injures ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... at the same time the weapons that man has made, from a club, such as was grasped by that same savage, when he crawled from his den in the ground and hunted a snake for his dinner; from that club to the boomerang, to the sword, to the cross-bow, to the blunderbuss, to the flint-lock, to the cap-lock, to the needle-gun, up to a cannon cast by Krupp, capable of hurling a ball weighing two thousand pounds through eighteen inches of ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... the last of this for a long time, either. I'll have you, and your old rack of bones, your mule Boomerang, run out of town, that's what ...
— Tom Swift in the City of Gold, or, Marvelous Adventures Underground • Victor Appleton
... can't refuse you anything, though I do think you and Miss Moore are asking me to be ridiculous. I do hereby solemnly swear to be, for the rest of this day, the most unaccommodating young person in the whole world. But beware, Ruth Stuart! The boomerang may return and strike you. Don't dare request me to do you a favor until after the bells chime midnight, when I shall be released ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane |
