"Jetsam" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the flotsam and jetsam in human guise that she found sprawling at the tables, but she decided ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... We come not to condemn, but reconcile; We come not to compel, but call again; We come not to destroy, but edify; Nor yet to question things already done; These are forgiven—matters of the past— And range with jetsam and with offal thrown Into the blind sea of forgetfulness. [A pause. Ye have reversed the attainder laid on us By him who sack'd the house of God; and we, Amplier than any field on our poor earth Can render thanks in fruit for being sown, Do here and now repay you ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads, arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and there a Sister with her "boys." ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... this world occasionally, good as well as bad. There came up a heavy storm, and the next morning, walking with my father on the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it might have been, as my father remarked, a relic of the Spanish Armada. And it was covered from end to end with the rarest and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... be reared, charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes for the North Pole. It depressed me, the sight of this vast lumber-room, this collection of useless flotsam and jetsam, cast up and rejected by the sea of strenuous life. Most moving of all, a broken golf-club standing in a dusty corner, and beside it a wofully scarred and battered ball. I pointed ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... dismasted, and on her beam-ends, with the surf pounding at her, and her spars and rigging, worked up into a raft, floating in the swirl alongside the beach; while on the shore, opposite where she lay, the little company that had been left aboard to take care of her laboured to save such flotsam and jetsam as the surf flung ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... work which is to resurrect this stricken city has gone steadily forward. Here and there over the waste where Johnstown stood in its pride black smoke arises from the bonfires on which shattered house-walls, rafters, doors, broken furniture and all the flotsam and jetsam of the great ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... gentleman called Fleurus, who had begun his career as a notary, but, finding that profession unprofitable, had become a hunter of pedigrees and heirs-at-law—for the most part to insignificant legacies, unclaimed stock, and all other jetsam and flotsam thrown up on the shadowy shores of the Court of Chancery. M. Fleurus had not often been so fortunate as to put his industrious fingers into any large pie, but he had contrived to make a good deal of money out of small affairs, and ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... look, it was Calvary Alley. At its open end and two feet above it the city went rushing and roaring past like a great river, quite oblivious of this unhealthy bit of backwater into which some of its flotsam and jetsam had been caught and held, generating crime and disease and sending them out again into ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... recently, "look upon submarine-hunting as a great game. The only time they are discontented is when a situation which looks like an approaching fight resolves itself into nothing. The seas of the war zone are, of course, filled with all sorts of flotsam and jetsam, and very often that which appears to be a periscope is nothing of the sort. But when a real one comes—then the men ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... the darkest days that England perhaps had ever known, when the German armies, having overcome the resistance of Belgium, suddenly swept forward again across France, pushing before them like the jetsam and flotsam on the rim of the advancing tide the allied armies. Often in these appalling weeks, Michael would hesitate as to whether he should go to see Sylvia or not, so unbearable seemed the fact that she did not and could not ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... outside this strip, lies the little port defended by a network of reefs, in which our Sambk had first taken refuge. The bay-shore bears traces of more than one wreck; and in the graveyard used by the native sailor, an open awning of flotsam and jetsam looks from afar like a tumble-down log-hut. The number of reefs and shoals shown by stripes of vivid green water promised excellent fishing, and failed to ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... to Morwenstow, 'the cruel and covetous natives of the strand, the wreckers of the seas and rocks for flotsam and jetsam,' held as an axiom and an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... in the matter of seigneurial rights of flotsam and jetsam were by no means as strict as his master's, especially where Carette was concerned. In his mute, dog-like way he worshipped Carette. In case of need, he would, I believe, have given his left hand in her service; and the ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... Cocos-Keeling Islands, in the Indian Ocean, cannot be passed over. He was eager to visit a coral-reef, and this atoll, stocked and planted only by the flotsam and jetsam of the seas, the winds, and migrating birds, offers to the naturalist a most delightful study; for here, progressing almost under his eyes, are the phenomena which have made Bermuda and other coral groups. Little as the Keeling Islands seem to offer in the way of secure habitation, they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... same: (1) Protection of person and goods; (2) abolition of the law which declared forfeit to the feudal lord such goods as, for instance, might happen to fall from a wagon and thereby touch the ground; (3) the abolition of the strand right, which had secured to the owner of the shore land the jetsam and flotsam of wrecked or stranded vessels; (4) the concession of legal procedure to the debtor; (5) liberation from the duel and other forms of the "divine judgment" in legal procedure; (6) the reduction of duties; (7) permission to sell at retail, as for example, cloth and linen by the ell—a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... struggle for existence, which in winter becomes terrible. The sea knows not charity. It massacres when it can and adds you to the line of dead things along its edge where you are only remembered by the ebb and flow of the tide. On blue calm mornings, being part of the jetsam, you may glisten in the sun beside a water-logged spar; at night you become a nonentity, of no more consequence along the wavering line of drift than a rotten gull. But if, like Marianne, you have fought skilfully, you may again enter ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... on the ocean of commerce—the jetsam and flotsam, of which the law must direct the disposal. The heirs, as they have been called, may come in to the wreck that lies on the shores of time, after the soul has gone to eternity—but law must decide whether these ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer. Instil into a boy's ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Barclay wouldn't prefer Sir Nigel?), was so cultured that he said, "Nobody in the whole world knows it, save you and I," and referred to "flotsam and jetson" as he was swimming out into the path of the rising sun. "Jetsam" is such an ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... finished frames at the other end of the room. Then, at least one-half a day of Joe Lathrop's valuable time went to waste while he was out trying to find some one to fill Robinson's place. His first attempt was made at the gate of the factory, where the sea of the unemployed threw up its flotsam and jetsam. But finishing piano frames is rather a fine job and none of the willing and eager applicants there could fill the bill. Joe then made the round of two or three employment agencies who had helped him out in previous similar emergencies. This time, however, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... the party by the Beach Commandant was to restore some semblance of order amongst the members of a certain Labour Corps who had run wild. This was achieved in an expeditious though somewhat violent manner. The next duty was salvaging amongst the flotsam and jetsam which, with the timber charging about and the water at a very low temperature, was a decidedly unpleasant task. Night put a stop to the operations, and the Beach Commandant congratulated the party on the work done. This officer was no lover of the "Aussies," owing—so rumour ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Bible is the shallowness of much of our thinking. If the Bible were needed for nothing else in present literary life, it would be needed for the deepening of literary currents. The vast flood of flotsam and jetsam which pours from the presses seldom floats on a deep current. It is surface matter for the most part. It does not take itself seriously, and it is quite impossible to take it seriously. It does not deal with great themes, or when it touches upon them it deals with them in a trifling ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... the face of a woman. As I lay in my hammock upstairs, however, I heard the old woman as she chafed the warmth back into her, crooning a chorus of, "Eh, the puir lassie! Eh, the bonnie lassie!" from which I gathered that this piece of jetsam was ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lower, and saw that from what had been gardened roof-parks, now a welter of strewn earth, the green things had spread till they covered the heaped jetsam with a healing blanket of foliage. Not all the city had been laid waste, however. Here and there, great expanses of the cliff-like structures still stood, undamaged, and in the midst of one of these areas he saw the high-piled ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... lives as woven on the loom of spiteful fates, whom they endeavored to humor by calling euphonious names. The materialist supposes that his life is the creature of circumstances, a rudderless ship in a current, mere flotsam and jetsam on the wave. The Christian knows that the path of his life has been prepared for him to walk in; and that its sphere, circumstances, and character are due to the thought and care of Him who has adapted it to our temperament and capabilities, ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... became tenant in tail, in right of his wife, but under his father, would he be able to grant leases for more than twenty-one years? and, if so, to whom would the right of trover belong? As to flotsam and jetsam—there was a little property, Mr Critic, on the sea-shore—that was a matter that had to be left unsettled at the last. Such points as these do take a long time to consider. All this bewildered the doctor sadly, and Frank himself began to make accusations that ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... shallow water, with seaweeds growing over the bottom, may extend outwards for miles. The nature of the shore varies greatly according to the nature of the rocks, according to what the streams bring down from inland, and according to the jetsam that is brought in by the tides. The shore is a changeful place; there is, in the upper reaches, a striking difference between "tide in" and "tide out"; there are vicissitudes due to storms, to freshwater ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... look of angry disgust with which Mr. Lovel surveyed it. Curtains and carpet were something the worse for wear, the old-fashioned furniture was a little sombre; but the rich binding of the books and a rare old bronze here and there redeemed it from commonness—poor jetsam and flotsam from the wreck of the great house, but enough to give some touch of elegance ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... before the month ended I had caught and branded for myself over one hundred mavericks. Cattle were so worthless that no one went to the trouble to brand completely; the crumbs were acceptable to me, and, since no one else cared for them and I did, the flotsam and jetsam of the range fell to my brand. Had I been ambitious, double that number could have been easily secured, but we never went off the home range in gathering calves to brand. All the hands on the Edwards ranch, darkies and Mexicans, were constantly throwing into the corrals ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... camphor-wood chests, containing goods; which, on the promise of a reasonable salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built into their houses. But the recovery of jetsam could not affect the result. It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended. Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor has any new plantation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... buffalo-hunters, whiskey smugglers, missionaries, prospectors, United States soldiery and newly organized North West Mounted Police crossed and recrossed the international boundary between the American Northwest and what was then known as the "Whoop Up Country." This heterogeneous flotsam and jetsam held some of the material from which Montana evolved its ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... braced his nerves for a long and hungry waiting, but fate had yielded suddenly;—the floods had brought her to him,—his flotsam and jetsam, more precious than all the guarded treasures of the earth. She had come, with all her girlish, unconscious beguilements, and all her womanly cares, and anxieties too. He must strive against her sweetness, while he helped her to bear ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... the greeting this army received on every side. The flotsam and jetsam which swirled along in its eddies or followed in its wake cheered, howled, and danced deliriously; men, women, and children from doorways and galleries raised their voices lustily, and applauded as if at some favorite carnival parade. In notable contrast was the ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... wriggling river life like a coral cell attaching itself to a slow growing atoll. From there he worked his way inshore, crawling over the craft that stretched out from the low banks as a water beetle might move over the flotsam and jetsam caught in the back-water of a sluggish stream. Once in the narrow, crowded streets of the city itself, he roamed aimlessly, open-eyed to its wonders, dreamily observant. Out of the native quarter and into the foreign section he moved, ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... squalid scene—a wide flat area where stakes and floors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by a hurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylight found no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blew the dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such strife ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... stock-owners in to-morrow, choose! The road these others tread Is littered deep with jetsam and the bones Of their dishonored dead. What altruism for defeat atones? Have ye not much ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... looked upon the worms that honeycombed their headstones' bases. What thoughts went through Bob Brownley's mind only his Maker knew. For minutes he stood motionless, then he walked on down Broadway. He went into the Battery. The benches were crowded with that jetsam and flotsam of humanity that New York's mighty sewers throw in armies upon her inland beaches at every sunrise: Here a sodden brute sleeping off a prolonged debauch, there a lad whose frankness of face and homespun clothes and bewildered eyes spelt, "from ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... the tower foot, (Flotsam and jetsam from over the sea, Can the dead feel joy or pain?) And the owls in the ivy blink and hoot, And the sea-waves bubble around its root, Where kelp and tangle and sea-shells be, When the bat in the dark flies silently. (Hark to ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... Catholic truth in the world," says Newman; "it comes down by tradition from age to age. . . . Men [outside the church] take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them." Not so Father Hecker: no flotsam and jetsam of doctrine for him, unless some fragment would reveal to him the name of the ship from which it had been torn, and the port from which she had sailed, and so lead him to the discovery of the ship herself, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... had deigned to carve me out a turnip lantern, an art-and-craft he was peculiarly deft in; and Harold, as the interior of the turnip flew out in scented fragments under the hollowing knife, had eaten largely thereof: regarding all such jetsam as his special perquisite. Now he was dreeing his weird, with such assistance as the chemist could afford. But Edward and I, knowing that this particular field was to be carried to-day, were revelling in the privilege of riding ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... Grass ventures to hope that this book will not be altogether regarded as mere flotsam and jetsam of English and American magazines. The stories, it will be found, have a certain continuity, and may challenge interest as apart from incident because an attempt has been made to reproduce atmosphere, the atmosphere ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... street and the opposite houses, and on the sills of the windows Sylvia cultivated a few cheap flowers, which were her delight. The room was furnished with all manner of odds and ends, flotsam and jetsam of innumerable sales attended by Aaron. There were Japanese screens, Empire sofas, mahogany chairs, Persian praying mats, Louis Quatorz tables, Arabic tiles, Worcester china, an antique piano that might have come out of the ark, and many other things of ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... means to us so infinitely valuable a possession, we have striven to preserve in print a few of the stories that still remain—flotsam and jetsam saved from the cruel rush of ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... to be seen also the human flotsam and jetsam of this northern country—miners, prospectors, drifters, government employees, and adventurers—all caught here as though in the cleats of a flume, at this focusing-point at the foot of the wild ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... would be interesting relics for collectors of such flotsam and jetsam of a ruined dynasty. On August 25, Charles answered Edgar. He is 'sorry that His Majesty is prevented against the most dutiful of sons.' He sends thanks for the engraved stones and the powers of Regency. This ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... stopped, that platform of a Paris railway station was turned into a thoroughly English scene. A wave from Great Britain swept over it, a tall and tweedy wave, bearing with it golf clubs and kitbags and every kind of English flotsam and jetsam. All the passengers had lately landed from the foreignest of foreign parts, coral strands, and that sort of remote thing, but they looked as incorruptibly, triumphantly British, every man, woman, and child of them (except a fringe of black or brown ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... scattered at the time of the winding up of the farm estate, and the only jetsam that Philip inherited out of it was an annotated copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Young's Travels in France, a copy of The Newcomes, and the first American edition of Childe Harold. Probably these ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... peaked gable, a chest of drawers which would have set a collector crazy, Chippendale chairs with the seats out, Windsor chairs with the backs broken, gilt mirror frames with no glass in them—boxes—books—bottles—all the flotsam and jetsam of such old establishments. Most of the things had been set back against the wall, but right in the middle of the floor was an object which I took at first for ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen, the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their soup-spoons ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... steamers on the Mississippi in our day), would have speedily found itself a good way down the Persian Gulf, and not long after in the Indian Ocean, somewhere between Arabia and Hindostan. Even if, eventually, the ark might have gone ashore, with other jetsam and flotsam, on the coasts of Arabia, or of Hindostan, or of the Maldives, or of Madagascar, its return to the "mountains of Ararat" would have been a miracle more stupendous ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... places, of which not a wreck now remains" ("The Origin of Species" (1st edition), page 396.).) were conceded freely, but few, if any, great enough to permit migration of truly terrestrial creatures. The only means of getting across the gaps was by the principle of the "flotsam and jetsam," a theory which Darwin took over from Lyell and further elaborated so as to make it applicable to many kinds of plants and animals, but sadly deficient, often grotesque, in the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... something which proves to be of practical value. Great is the rejoicing of those who are benefited thereby; and, for the moment, science is the Diana of all the craftsmen. But, even while the cries of jubilation resound and this floatsam and jetsam of the tide of investigation is being turned into the wages of workmen and the wealth of capitalists, the crest of the wave of scientific investigation is far away on its course over the illimitable ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... better reason till we should stand upon the spot associated with his crime. Nor did he pursue the subject; but he walked beside me with a firmer step. The call that I had made upon his mind acted like a stimulant, and I could see that he had forgotten his search for worthless jetsam, in a profound, gloomy, and yet stirring train of thought. In three or four minutes we had topped the brae and began to go down upon Sandag. The wreck had been roughly handled by the sea; the stem had been spun ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bottom upwards—a wreck, with its side stove in, entangled in a mass of flotsam and jetsam which had gathered in one of the side ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... should turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement—these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the morning of the 18th the Brigade moved northwards along a road strewed with the jetsam of a retreating army, until Ramleh was reached. Here a bivouac area was taken up in an olive grove but after three hours' halt, orders were received for an advance on Ludd, the ancient Lydda. We arrived at 19.00 and bivouacked beside the road about half a mile ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... "This flotsam and jetsam of her talk came to me from time to time as confidential asides from the main flow of palaver which rolled along steadily toward the Judge. The Judge, poor fellow, showed plainly the effects of the struggle; so much so, that I suggested a ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... paper on which he has written the information, corks up the flask, and casts it into the sea. If the bottle goes to the bottom, it is in the department of the lagan officer; if it floats, it is in the department of the flotsam officer; if it be thrown upon shore, it concerns the jetsam officer." ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... had begun with a gusto. It stirred one's blood. It called—it summoned with such a promise of variety, of adventure, of flotsam and jetsam and shuttlecock of chances, that I, a youth with twenty-one dollars and a half at disposal, all his clothes on his back, a man's weapon at his belt, and an appointment with a lady as his future, forgetful of past and courageous in present, strode confidently, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin |
