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Adrift   /ədrˈɪft/   Listen
Adrift

adverb
1.
Floating freely; not anchored.
2.
Off course, wandering aimlessly.



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"Adrift" Quotes from Famous Books



... week; piles of dirty dishes and cooking-utensils of strange, unfamiliar shapes lay here and there around the little galley forward; coils of running rigging were kicking about under-foot instead of hanging on the belaying-pins; a pig-pen, which had apparently gone adrift in a gale, blocked up the gangway to the forecastle on the port side between the high bulwark and a big boat which had been lashed in V-shaped supports amidships; and a large part of the space between the cabin and the forecastle ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... to do?" asked Mrs. Coomber, almost crying herself; "the boat will soon be adrift with this wind and tide, and we shall all be drowned like rats in ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie

... even before he realised that—in obedience, it appears, to Heemskirk's orders given beforehand to the gunner— the tow-rope had been let go at the blast of the whistle, before he had time to cry out or to move a limb, he saw her cast adrift and shooting across the gunboat's stern with the impetus of her speed. He followed her fine, gliding form with eyes growing big with incredulity, wild with horror. The cries on board of her came to him only as a dreadful and confused murmur through the loud thumping of blood in his ears, while ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

... foothills climbed swiftly to the mountains, and the mountains more swiftly to the sky. There were faint blue mists in the foothills, fainter violet shadows on the distant fields, an icy whiteness on the peaks; and in the sky no more than two small puffs of cloud like eiderdown adrift in the depths of blue. What at first had seemed an utter silence laid upon that summer landscape had now become, as she looked and listened, a silence full of sound; of that indefinable humming undertone ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... down, and then criss-crossed. But she must know of her mistake before we had gone so far that putting me ashore would be a serious inconvenience—for I knew he would put me ashore at the nearest point, if not, indeed, set me adrift in an open ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris

... to hear thee howl on the rack, I would debase this sword, and lay thee prostrate At this thy paramour's feet; then drag her forth 310 Stained with adulterous blood, and— —mark you, traitress! Strumpeted first, then turned adrift to beggary! Thou ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... my old canoe," said he. "Somebody must have left it adrift up the river. I wonder how it floated down here without being picked up." He put out his hand and caught it, as it touched ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... of its own strength got developed into another and a finer woman. She became captain of my Freshman soul, at the same time she captured the captaincy of the boat crew, on which I pulled stroke, and I'm still hitting the water when she gives the word, though it now looks as if we are both adrift on the high and uncharted seas—or sitting on the lid of a ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... with blank disappointment. It was gone—there can be no doubt about it, and was utterly irrecoverable. "Don't grumble, my lads. We should have been worse off had we been fast to it with a gale blowing, and unable to cut ourselves adrift," exclaimed Mr Brand. "Let us thank the Almighty that we have escaped so great a danger. We'll run under the lee of that island for the night, and try and find the ship in the morning." Accordingly we bore away, and were in a short time in comparatively ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... replied:—"Don't you talk of clearing out, not till Miss Tarver she tells you." Moses' answer was:—"I'm agreeable, Dave"; and the matter dropped until some time after, when he had made Dolly Tarver's acquaintance. She, on hearing that her union with David would send Mo again adrift, had threatened to declare off if such a thing was so much as spoke of. So Moses had remained on, in the character of a permanency saturated with temporariness; and, when the little boy Dave began to take his place in Society, proceeded to appropriate—so ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... shall have to cut their food down to half rations. We've been adrift nearly sixteen days now and not a smoke plume from the Vulcan. She has lost us—if ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling

... was, that he connected himself with a party of adventurers, and they all set forth for the place where he had rested among the gullies. His companions proved treacherous; and when they had come sufficiently near to be able, as they thought, to find the spot without his assistance, they turned him adrift. They sought the golden rock for three days—but in vain; and he went back to Sydney, to invite Mr Rutter to accompany him. Here ends our narrative for the present; and a most instructive one it is. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various

... was submerged. Thurstane and Clara were overwhelmed by such a mass of water that they thought themselves at the bottom of the sea. Two men who had not mounted the rigging, but tried to cling to the boat davits, were hurled adrift and sent to agonize in the undertow. The brig trembled as if it were on the point of breaking up and dissolving in the horrible, furious yeast of breakers. Even to the people on shore the moment and the spectacle were sublime and tremendous ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... be writhing in the gloom. The river, free now from the gorges and shallows around the city, had ceased its roaring. It seethed and swirled along in absolute silence, effacing all trace of the land. The two men felt like a couple of shipwrecked sailors adrift on a shoreless, sunless ocean, alone save for the reddish flame flickering at the prow, and the submerged treetops that ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... by the trees, she pulled out vigorously for the Springton shore. When she reached it, she drew the boat up cautiously on the beach, fastened it, and hid herself among the trees. Her plan was to wait there until dusk, then push the boat adrift in the lake, and go out herself adrift into the world. She dared not set out on her walk to Fairfield until it was dark; she knew, moreover, that the northern train did not pass until nearly midnight. These hours that Hetty spent crouched under ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson

... queen consort gave birth to another prince, on whom the unnatural sisters had no more compassion than on his brother; but exposed him likewise in a basket, and set him adrift in the canal, pretending this time that the sultaness was delivered of a cat. It was happy also for this child that the intendant of the gardens was walking by the canal side. He carried this child to his wife, and charged her to take as much care of it as of the former, which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous

... and delightful to him. He was, therefore, much more disposed—except in the face of absolutely conclusive evidence—to rationalise than to deny a vulgar error, to bring explanations and saving clauses to its aid, than to cut it adrift utterly. In this part of his work his distinguishing graces and peculiarities of style appear but sparingly and not eminently. In the other division, consisting of the Religio Medici, the Urn-Burial, the Christian Morals, and the Letter to a Friend, his strictly ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... grasps. Now the whole company rush towards the water, and the pater deposits the supposed devil on board the raft, on which the palongs row off with the greatest possible expedition, dragging the captive out to sea, to a considerable distance, when, having turned him and his vehicle adrift, they row back with the utmost speed to shore. For two days the enemy may survive this rough usage, and again land in safety, if driven on shore by the tide or wind, but on the third day he must die. Should he land ...
— Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives • John Gottfried Haensel

... going to go and take little Harry. We supposed it was all right. Last Saturday she went, sir. She was going to walk to the station, and the last seen of her she was trudging along the road, carrying the baby. It hasn't been thought of since. But, sir, d'ye suppose she set that innocent child adrift in that old leaky dory to send him to his death? I knew Maggie was no better than she should be, but I can't believe she was as ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... might as well send for the guillotine at once, and cut off all our heads. You don't know my mistress as I do. Ah, butchers, you will drag nothing out of that but her corpse. And is it come to this? the great old family to be turned adrift like beggars. My poor mistress! my pretty demoiselles that I played with and nursed ever since I was a child! (I was just six when Josephine was born) and that I shall love with my ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... you adrift!" cried Ruth. "I have a very dear friend I must introduce you to. Oh—" she hesitated and turned to the Governor, "is Mr. Comly a roamer? Has he a heart ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... Argos. His name is Acrisius. Before I was born a prophecy was made to him that the son of Danae, his daughter, would slay him. Acrisius was frightened by the prophecy, and when I was born he put my mother and myself into a chest, and he sent us adrift upon the waves of ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... of the natives came off to us, each in a canoe, and bartered a few fishing implements for tobacco. One of them, a young man, overset his canoe, while along-side of one of our boats. Our people caught hold of him, but the canoe went adrift, and, being picked up by another, was carried ashore. The youth, by this accident, was obliged to come into the ship; and he went down into my cabin, upon the first invitation, without expressing the least reluctance or uneasiness. His dress was an upper garment, like a shirt, made ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... and misused, vested the government of the Church in the presbyterate; and the national sentiment approved of the change. But there was no necessity for upsetting the whole cathedral system, and rooting out the whole cathedral staff, because the bishop was turned adrift. Had the Canonries been spared, an immense boon would have been secured for the Reformed Church. Had the stipends attached to them not been alienated, the Church would have possessed, at all its most important centres, a staff of clergymen chosen for their ability and ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... rose and walked along the toilsome shingle, scarcely noting which way he went—his thoughts being busy with the martyrdom he had witnessed, flushing one moment with a glorious indignation, and fainting the next with despondent reflections on his own friendless state. For he looked upon himself as adrift on the tides of the world, believing that his patron, the Earl of Glencairn, would to a surety condemn his lack of fortitude in not enduring the servitude of the Archbishop, after having been in so miraculous a manner accepted ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... Weak, without distinction of mind or heart, they have the money to hire brains to plan, plot, scheme, advocate, supervise and work for them. Suddenly deprived of their stocks and bonds they would find themselves adrift in the sheerest helplessness. With these stocks and bonds they are the direct absolute masters of an army of employees. On the New York Central Railroad alone the Vanderbilt payroll embraces fifty thousand workers. This is but one of their ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... how his own life had shaped itself before him as the gloomy sequel to his father's. But why should she gaze at him with those anxious, troubled eyes, at the very moment when he had resolved to cut himself adrift from all the temptations of ambition? The mute appeal awoke no answering softness in his breast, and he met it with a look ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson

... must allow me to pick one, Sam. My friend Jim Slagg is at present cast adrift with a considerable part of the Great Eastern's crew. He will be delighted to go, I know, and is a first-rate, hard-working, willing, ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne

... make a love-sick poet pay court to wisdom. I could scarcely keep from laughing at the look of perplexity and indignation in Tullus's face when he quoted Propertius's reply. The boy actually asked them if they thought the poor flute ought to be set adrift just because swelled cheeks weren't becoming to Pallas! The long and short of it is that he wants me to interfere, and convince Propertius of his public duty. That public duty may conceivably take the form of writing ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... not acquired habits of making definite decisions will find themselves badly adrift when they reach the adolescent period, with its rapid changes of mood and the masses of frequently conflicting impulses. To be able to restrain each impulse to action as it arises, and to hold it in abeyance until all the alternatives have been canvassed, is a power that comes ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... as she knelt, the religious instinct regained possession of her. It was as if her soul had been flung adrift, had gone out with the ebb of the spiritual sea, and now rocked, poised, waiting for the turn ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... I turned adrift, Helpless as sailor cast on desart rock; Nor morsel to my mouth that day did lift, Nor dared my hand at any door to knock. I lay, where with his drowsy mates, the cock From the cross timber of an out-house hung; How dismal tolled, that night, the city clock! At morn my sick heart ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge

... thought was to return to Europe; but she did not want to go alone. The vision of her solitary figure adrift in the spring mob of trans-Atlantic pleasure-seekers depressed and mortified her. She would be sure to run across acquaintances, and they would infer that she was in quest of a new opportunity, a fresh start, and would suspect her of trying to use them for the purpose. The ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... eager dupe, was made the cat's-paw. I was put on an old, condemned freighter, with food and supplies supposed to last me a lifetime, but with no power capsules and no means of steering the ship. I was set adrift in a derelict on a lonely orbit of exile around the ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl

... us adrift here?" asked Simpson, who was anxious to learn what was going to become of himself ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... in earth or hell to effect a divorcement after Christ and the soul are united. Other kings have turned out their companions when they got weary of them, and sent them adrift from the palace gate. Ahasuerus banished Vashti; Napoleon forsook Josephine; but Christ is the husband that is true forever. Having loved you once, He loves you to the end. Did they not try to divorce Margaret, the Scotch girl, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... why, Harve. Well, that one single night Penn and his folks was to the hotel Johnstown was wiped out. 'Dam bust an' flooded her, an' the houses struck adrift an' bumped into each other an' sunk. I've seen the pictures, an' they're dretful. Penn he saw his folk drowned all'n a heap 'fore he rightly knew what was comin'. His mind give out from that on. He mistrusted somethin' hed happened ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling

... hardly expect a cowboy, adrift in the middle of a swollen river to be drawing distinctions ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... his liquor with his former assurance. While outwardly he was the same suave, debonair old beau, he was beginning to have inner doubtings and despairs. And Joe, who had, as it were, taken up the pen when he had cast aside the sword, became for him a potential straw adrift on ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... fearless, that spoke of the genius in the soul. It was a kindly face withal, and with humour lurking about the eyes and mouth. During the day and night spent with him Shock had come to feel that in this man there was anchorage for any who might feel themselves adrift, and somehow the great West, with its long leagues of empty prairie through which he had passed, travelling by the slow progress of construction trains, would now seem a little less empty because of this man. Between the new field toward which this trail led and the home ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor

... leave Carlingford next morning, and whom he had set his heart on taking to see Lucy. But his walk in the garden was far from being delightful to Frank. It even occurred to him, for a moment, that it would be a very good thing if a man could cut himself adrift from his relations at such a crisis of his life. After all, it was his own business—the act most essentially personal of his entire existence; and then, with a little softening, he began to think of the girls at home—of the little sister, who had a love-story of her own; and of ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... the first four years of the century. He ran through his maternal inheritance by silly dissipations, and then helped his friend Wilhelm Schwab to make away with the hundred thousand francs his parents had left him. Without resources and cast adrift by his father he went to Paris in 1835, where, upon the recommendation of Graff, the inn-keeper, he obtained a position with Keller at six hundred francs per annum. In 1843 he was only two thousand francs ahead; but Gedeon Brunner having died, he became a multi-millionaire. Then for ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... never drinks; and as to fighting, if you can believe such a thing, miss, I don't think he has had a casual turnup three times in his life—not oftener, at any rate. All he wants is to be married; and then he'll be steady to his grave. But if he's left adrift now, Lord knows what will become of him. He'll mope first—he's moping at present—then he'll drink; then he'll lose his pupils, get out of condition, be beaten, and—One word from you, miss, would save him. If I might ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... might be put into the scales, which swang on the gangway; and whether the captain thought that they would sink his ship, or for what I can not tell, but he ordered me to quit her immediately—so, there I was adrift again. I packed up my traps and went on shore, putting on my new boots out of spite, and trod into all the mud and mire I could meet, and walked up and down from Plymouth to Dock until I was tired, as a punishment to them, until I wore the ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat

... it a continual source of wonder that Pippin, at his age, should cut himself adrift from the associations and security of London life to begin a new career in a new country with dubious prospect of success. 'I always heard he was doing well all round,' he thought; 'thinks he'll better himself, perhaps. He's a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... (De Doctr. Christ. ii) that "it is a sign of fortitude to cut oneself adrift from all the deadly pleasures of the passing show." Now noisome pleasures and delights are the concern of temperance rather than of fortitude. Therefore it seems that fortitude is not the gift corresponding to the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... dry rot of official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the world, with five hundred francs in his pocket. In one glorious debauch, which lasted a week, he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled down to live on a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... name and what his business upon the premises. The interrogations of the gentlemen and the ungentle shakings administered by his captors elicited nothing but groans and muttered oaths. He could not, or would not, walk without support, and to leave him where he was, or to turn him adrift into the public road, would be certain death. Therefore Mr. Aylett had ordered him to be confined for the night in a garret room. In the morning he might be examined to ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... collecting here ever since the first interplanetary rocket-ships went forth," Crain reminded him. "Not only meteor-wrecked ships, but ships whose mechanisms went wrong—or that ran out of fuel like ours—or that were captured and sacked, and then set adrift by space-pirates." ...
— The Sargasso of Space • Edmond Hamilton

... was it? Wait, don't tell me! It was five o'clock this morning, wasn't it? Yes? Gough bless me, I knew it! High water to the very minute—aw, he'll rise in the world, and die at the top of the tide. How did I know when the child was born, ma'am? As aisy as aisy. We were lying adrift of Cronk ny Irrey Lhaa, looking up for daylight by the fisherman's clock. Only light enough to see the black of your nail, ma'am. All at once I heard a baby's cry on the waters. 'It's the nameless child of Earey Cushin,' sings out one of the boys. 'Up with ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... theory begins to be that, in receiving as literally authentic what was but hieroglyphically so, Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in that case we scruple not to name Hofrath Nose-of-Wax, was made a fool of, and set adrift to make fools of others. Could it be expected, indeed, that a man so known for impenetrable reticence as Teufelsdrockh would all at once frankly unlock his private citadel to an English Editor and a German Hofrath; and not rather deceptively inlock both Editor and Hofrath in the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... the professor solemnly; "it is all that and worse, because we shall have to cut ourselves adrift from all Government protection and trust to our own wits. Now then, my man, do not hesitate for an instant—if you feel that you cannot cheerfully put up with peril and danger, and dare every risk, say so at once, for you will be doing ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... adrift, Enda," she said; "but first take out your shining spear; the water-dress and the crystal helmet will take ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy

... to repeat: when we took over the Philippines, we unquestionally at the same time acquired a burden. Of this burden we can rid ourselves by setting the Islands adrift; or we can declare that we intend to keep the Islands, as we have kept Porto Rico. In the light of the argument hereinbefore submitted, which of these courses appeals to the people of the United States? May we, or may we not, without incurring an accusation of injustice to a dependent population, ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... immediate anxiety about his niece. As yet such questions were only a sort of intellectual exercise; the time had not come when they should be intensely real, and she should seek for an answer with all the force of her life, and know the anguish of despair which comes when a soul feels itself adrift upon a sea of unbelief. They were not of enough importance to talk of to John, even if she had not known they would trouble him; she and Gifford had merely spoken of them as speculations of general interest; yet all the while they were shaping ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... May 22. Last night wind headed us off, so that part of the time we had to steer east-south-east and then west-north-west, and so on. This morning we were all startled by a cry of 'SAIL HO!' Sure enough, we could see it! And for a time we cut adrift from the second mate's boat, and steered so as to attract its attention. This was about half-past five A.M. After sailing in a state of high excitement for almost twenty minutes we made it out to be the chief mate's boat. Of course we were glad to see them and have them report ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... had raised a single skiff adrift upon the face of the ocean. Its only occupant was a delirious seaman, who yelled hoarsely as they hoisted him aboard, and showed a dried-up tongue like a black and wrinkled fungus at the back of his mouth. Water and nursing soon transformed him into the strongest ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Alincourt brought out their chairs and their knitting in the calm, fragrant evening air and remained silent, sadly enraptured while the unseen player at her keyboard aloft in the belfry above set her carillon music adrift under the summer stars—golden harmonies that seemed born in the heavens from which they floated; clear, exquisitely sweet miracles of melody filling the world of darkness ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... realization of their horrible position struck all dumb. Adrift on the great polar sea, they might freeze to death before they again got near to the main land. The dogs continued to run on, approaching nearer the ever-widening crack in front. The driver seemed to suddenly awaken ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood

... the regular intervals at which the fir branches succeeded each other in the same track, looked for a cause, and perceived, at length, higher up the bank of the stream, a fox, which, having evidently sent them adrift, was eagerly watching their progress and the effect they produced. Satisfied with the result, cunning Reynard at last selected a larger branch of spruce-fir than usual, and couching himself down on it, set it adrift as he had done the others. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... a husband and a father. You know what you would feel to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless, prattling little ones turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, and left almost without the necessary support of a miserable ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... Norton, although I know you do me in money matters now and then, still I believe you to be a faithful fellow. In fact, you owe me more than you are aware of. You know not how I have resisted the respectable old nobleman's wishes to send you adrift as an impostor and cheat. I held firm, however, and told him I could never with honor ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... of Suddenne, was captured by Saracens, who killed his father, and turned him and his twelve companions adrift in a boat, which was eventually beached safely on the coast of Westerness, and Ailmar the king took them in and brought them up. Rymenhild his daughter, falling in love with Horn, offered herself to him. He refused, unless she would make the king knight him. ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick

... observes. We learn that the English insist on the dismissal of Miss Walkinshaw. To discard Dumont, as Charles proposed, was to provide England with an informer. The heads of English gentlemen would be at the mercy of the executioners of Archy Cameron. To turn adrift Charles's Catholic servants was impolitic, cruel, and deeply ungrateful. This is the burden of Goring's necessary but very uncourtly epistle, probably written from 'La ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... thrilling pleasures there are in store for us in literature when once we have cut ourselves adrift from all this superfluity of cultured opinion, and have given ourselves complete leave to love what we like and hate what we like and be indifferent to what we like, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... the Mannheim theater were presently strained to the point of disgust by the production of a farce in which he was satirized. He was in terrible straits for money. To have something to do, after he was set adrift by Dalberg, he decided to go ahead with his project of a dramatic journal. An attractive prospectus for the Rhenish Thalia was issued, and he began to prepare for the first number, which was to contain an installment of 'Don Carlos'. The advance subscriptions fell far short of his sanguine hopes. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... Wilkinson, and Lieutenant's yielding, but of this there is no certainty, save the report of some of the sicke men of the Charity, turned adrift in a boat out of the Charity and taken up and brought on shore yesterday to Sole Bay, and the newes hereof brought by Sir Henry Felton. Home to dinner, and Creed with me. Then he and I down to Deptford, did some business, and back ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... her light draught of water, to render much aid in exploring the rivers and steaming against currents. She left on the 6th of July, towed out of Hudson's Bay by the Sydney steamer. The weather became stormy, and the steamer was compelled to cut her adrift during the night. Left to herself and her gallant captain, with a crew of two men only, she made her way to Sydney. During this time the coast was visited by severe gales, and much anxiety was felt for the Sir Charles Hotham. The agents ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills

... send a man to the Station. He'll find the scooters lying gutted. Send another man over here to the Pallas. He'll find the scoopships gone. I also took a few photographs of the autopilots being installed and the ships being cast adrift. Go right ahead. However, may I remind you that the fewer people who have an inkling of this little intrigue, the ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson

... into a prolonged slumber, probably caused by the foul air in that part of the vessel. When the brig is four days at sea, a majority of the crew mutiny; and after killing many of those who have not joined them, Captain Barnard is set adrift in a small boat, without food and with only a jug of water. Young Barnard is permitted to remain on the vessel. There is a dog that plays a leading part in the mutiny episode by acting as a messenger between Barnard and Pym, who had no other means ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... of the dory-rodin'. I handed it to him so's he'd have somethin' to take up his mind. And, by time, he'd forgot all about it and let it drop! And the dory had gone adrift ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... Mr. Douglas had been discarded, Mr. Lincoln made a formal proposal for the hand of Miss Todd, but it appears that the young lady was not willing to capitulate at once. She believed that she could send her lover adrift to-day ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley

... and she was turned adrift, without her salary being regularly paid. She had contracted a debt of three hundred pounds, for which she was sent to the King's Bench prison, though she convinced me, by documents that she produced, that she had at the time seven quarters of her salary, seven ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... had sent her back into her haunting remembrances of the Lusitania and of her own helpless entanglement in the fate of other ships—their names as unknown to her as the names and faces of the men that died with them, or perished of starvation and thirst in the lifeboats sent adrift. The thought of these poor anonymities frightened her. She shuddered with such violence that Davidge was startled from ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... England had turned adrift, and France had won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... the mutineers—he and his comrade here," the captain answered. "Then those who had revolted, and seized the ship, ordered into small boats all who would not throw in their lot with them. So these two, with only a little food and water, were put adrift in the storm. It was almost certain death, but the boat lived through it, and ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose

... either. The Count swore he would marry her; and, though she did not leave him until that monster tried to poison her, yet think what a fine Christian spirit the poor girl has shown! she forgives him as heartily—more heartily, I am sure, than I do Mrs. Score for turning her adrift in that wicked way." The reader will perceive some difference in the Doctor's statement and ours, which we assure him is the true one; but the fact is, the honest rector had had his tale from Mrs. Cat, and it was not in his nature ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Boarders must be warned an' watched, elseways we shall hev all in the house afloat, 'cepting the stoves an' flat-irons, by-'n'-by. Somebody at Mrs. Moyler's acted so, and the house was like a roarin' sea, with the baby adrift in his little cradle, and the roaches a-swimmin' round. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... and in 1783 a certain Lenormand dropped from a tree in a parachute. Blanchard the balloonist made a spectacle of parachuting, and made it a financial success; Cocking, in 1836, attempted to use an inverted form of parachute; taken up to a height of 3,000 feet, he was cut adrift, when the framework of the parachute collapsed ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... the carnage, and 6,000 were drowned in attempting to escape over the river Elbe. After this fury had subsided, the remaining inhabitants were stripped naked, severely scourged, had their ears cropped, and being yoked together like oxen were turned adrift. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... they found small store of food, but an enormous loot of furs. The season was advancing. The Chevalier de Troyes bade his men disband and find their way as best they could to Quebec. Only enough English prisoners were retained to carry the loot of furs back overland. The rest were turned adrift in the woods. Of fifty prisoners, only twenty survived the winter of 1686-87. Some perished while trying to tramp northward to Nelson, and some died in the woods, after a vain endeavour to save their miserable lives ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut

... really would have been made simple and commonplace at once, if I had only asked their meaning. I was, for the most of the time, in a world of my own. I had a great deal of imagination, and was always telling myself stories; and my mind was adrift in these so much, that my real absent-mindedness was mistaken for childish unconcern. Yet I was a thoroughly simple unaffected child. My dreams and thoughtfulness gave me a certain tact and perception unusual in a child; but my pleasures were as deep in ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various

... Ahenobarbus. "Never a sesterce will I get out of him! He's as good as turned me adrift, and Cato my uncle is always giving him bad reports of me, like the hypocritical Stoic that ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... concern &c 9; have no business there, have nothing to do with, intrude &c 24. bring in head and shoulders, drag in head and shoulders, lug in head and shoulders. Adj. irrelative^, irrespective, unrelated; arbitrary; independent, unallied; unconnected, disconnected; adrift, isolated, insular; extraneous, strange, alien, foreign, outlandish, exotic. not comparable, incommensurable, heterogeneous; unconformable &c 83. irrelevant, inapplicable; not pertinent, not to the, purpose; impertinent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... contemplated such a possibility. He could easily imagine his feelings upon being cast helplessly adrift in the midst of a raging gale, with his tried and true chums hidden from his sight by the rain and ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel

... organs, again, that are the most completely separate from the body, as the locomotive engine, must still from time to time kiss the soil of the human body, and be handled and thus crossed with man again if they would remain in working order. They cannot be cut adrift from the most living form of matter (I mean most living from our point of view), and remain absolutely without connection with it for any length of time, any more than a seal can live without coming up sometimes to breathe; and in so far as they become linked on to ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... says, in the slipshod, loosely-strung notes by which he has been somewhat grandiloquently said to have "anticipated the labours" of the biographer—"my birthday was ominous to my poor father, who was the day after our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a wife and ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill

... have been different if Bill had been living. Was it because when he had died, she still had had Martin, demanding, vital, to goad her on and give the semblance of a point to her life, and now she was left alone, adrift? She pondered over ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius

... fast adrift? I am he they call Old Care. Here on board we will thee lift. No: I may not enter there. Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree In a bowl Care may not be; In a ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... violence. As for his own career, it was overcast by no such unlucky star, and he passed unscathed through all the hazards and vicissitudes that could be encountered in that rugged and heroic era of endeavor. Set adrift in Canton when the Massachusetts was sold, he promptly turned his hand to repairing a large Danish ship which had been wrecked by storm, and he virtually rebuilt her to the great satisfaction ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... longing to re-live the dreaming, Adrift in my canoe? To watch my paddle blade all wet and gleaming Cleaving the waters through? To lie wind-blown and wave-caressed, until Your restless pulse ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... enjoyment; to them water stood for drinking or drowning, nothing else, and since one could not drink the sea, to be in it meant, even for a ghost, to drown. Consequently, when the word went round the just rousing villages that "He-on-foot-from-afar" was adrift in the waves, rescue parties were hurriedly organised, a boat launched, and, in spite of all my kicking and shouting (which they took to be evidence of my semi-moribund condition), I was speedily hauled out by hairy and powerful hands, pungent ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... stunned, I staggered to my feet, but the air seemed full of cries and curses. Opening my eyes ruefully, I saw all faces turned upwards, and when I looked above,—the balloon was adrift. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... losing it. In the same letter, he confesses that he does not quite understand "what we are fighting for, or what definite result can be expected. If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should be to cut them adrift." ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... turned his head away and cleared his throat suspiciously, feeling, as he told his wife afterwards, like a veritable robber who had stolen their home, and turned these two helpless and innocent girls adrift in the wide world, of which ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin

... through the night from dusk to daytime Under her feet the hours were swift, Under her feet the hours of playtime Rose and fell with a rhythmic lift: Music set her adrift, adrift, Music eddying towards the day Swept her along as brooks in Maytime ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt

... taken up every line, every channel and stone and rapid of that flood, and had engraved them in ineffaceable characters. With the unintelligible vagary of thought, while his breast seemed crushed, his heart broken, he had imagined himself adrift on that surging river, and he had planned his escape through ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... only fainted. Scare't it's likely, findin' herself adrift in that boat. You needn't trouble yourself about ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson

... had not passed, however, before our traveller had tangible evidence that trouble had fallen to the lot of some who had preceded him. A stray ox was feeding on his track: the mate of which, he afterwards learned, was killed, and this one turned adrift as useless. He coaxed this waif to be the companion of his journey, taking care to stop where he could provide himself with the needful sustenance. He had not travelled far before he found a mate for his ox, and ere long a wagon, which had given ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various

... thought mayhap she'd take a warning from me. Don't you read them letters, my dear. If you do, let the words go in at one ear and out of the other. Roland Tresham! he be nothing to trust to! Aw, my dear—a leaky boat—a boat adrift; no man at the helm; no helm to man; no sail; no compass; no anchor; no anything for a woman to trust to! There, then, I have had my say; if this say be of no 'count, twould be the same if I talked my tongue away. If you come again and there be any letters, you will find them under the turned boat—slip ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... figures upon the head of the landing stage that he confidently apprehended being fired upon at any moment; but minutes lengthened and he was not. Either the Germans were looking for bigger game than a dory adrift, or the dazzling flare hindered more than ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... Kington-St-Michael, near Chippenham. His parents were in humble circumstances, and he was left an orphan at an early age. At sixteen he went to London and was apprenticed to a wine merchant. Prevented by ill-health from serving his full term, he found himself adrift in the world, without money or friends. In his fight with poverty he was put to strange shifts, becoming cellarman at a tavern and clerk to a lawyer, reciting and singing at a small theatre, and compiling a collection of common songs. After some slight successes as a writer, a Salisbury publisher ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... eloquent of all the AEsir," says the "Edda." A voice of wail went through the palaces of Asgard when Balder was slain by the mistletoe dart. Hermod rode down to the kingdom of Hela, or Death, to ransom the lost one. Meantime his body was set adrift on a floating funeral pyre. Hermod would have succeeded in his mission, had not Lok, the Spirit of Evil, interposed to thwart him. For this, Lok was bound in prison, with cords made of the twisted intestines of one of his own sons; and he will remain imprisoned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... than call him an idiot? He must be that or else a heartless knave. And he says that he does not mean to see me,—me with whose life he has thus been empowered to interfere, so as to blast it if not to bless it, and intends to turn me adrift as he might do a dog that did not suit him! And because he knows that he cannot answer me he declares that ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... adrift here and there in the straw. Their weariness was alleviated. They set about writing and card-playing. That evening I dated my letter to Marie "at the Front," with a flourish of pride. I understood that glory consists in doing what ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... we again find him adrift, apparently with thought of having his bird drawings published, after he shall have further added to them by going through many of the ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs

... have abandoned himself to a career of vice; he would have become a blackleg, a swindler, a drunkard, a beggar at the doors of the kinsman who had cast him off. But it was not so with Reginald Eversleigh. From the moment in which he found himself cast adrift by the benefactor who had been more than a father to him, he confronted evil fortune calmly and bravely. He cut the link between himself and extravagant companions. He disappeared from the circles in which he had been admired and courted; and the only ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... pigs with no iron living in their noses got adrift and escaped into the interior, and have flourished like the green bay-tree, destroying the Bubi's plantation and eating his yams, while the Bubi retaliating kills and eats them. So it's a drawn battle, for the Bubi enjoys the pig and the pig enjoys the yams, which are of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... considerable benefit to me. It would have been no small hardship to have been turned adrift immediately under my unfavourable circumstances, with the additional disadvantage of the wound I had received; and yet I could scarcely have ventured to remain under the same roof with a man, to whom my appearance was as a guilty conscience, perpetually reminding him of his own offence, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... over the ship. Gradually it descended; the top-gallant and top-sails were lost in this mysterious vapor, yet the horizon line still glimmered faintly. Then another mist seemed to rise from the sea and meet it; in another instant the deck whereon they stood shrank to the appearance of a raft adrift in a faint gray sea. With the complete obliteration of all circumambient space, the wind ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... the kind-hearted armourer, "if those lads find not their kinsman, or find him not what they look for, bring them back hither, I cannot have them cast adrift. They are good and brave youths, and I owe ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of engines, the rattle of a little anchor going over not a hundred yards away, a cough, and Morgan's subdued hail. ... So far as I remember, it was Laughton whom I hugged; but the men who hugged me most were Pyecroft and Moorshed, adrift among ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... here and there for the benefit of my companions. The arrival of the Baron d'Ezonville recalled our own with curious exactness, except that he came with one servant only. He had been taken to the inn, as I had, but he had never escaped from there, and had been turned adrift the morning after his arrival. I took more interest in Stefan, and followed eagerly the story of how the islanders had come to his house, and demanded that he should revoke the sale. Stefan, however, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various

... and Ruth gave her the shoe she had lost. Her father followed her. He turned as though to set the boat adrift, but Ruth laid her ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... forfeited a shining place in the world's eye by devotion to his art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the leaky carcass of a boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate Island (as men always do who find their true vocation) where he is absolute lord, making all the powers of Nature serve him, but with Ariel and Caliban as special ministers? Of whom else could he have ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... Intrepid and Pioneer made fast, although the boat's crew that first reached it, in making a hole, were wetted by a projecting mass detaching itself with the first blow of the seaman's crowbar. A gale sprang up almost immediately, and during the night the Assistance blew adrift. Next day it abated, and the ice to ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn

... shall perceive me adrift somewhat as to direction; for I had steered before this time so that I should come to the North of the House of Silence; and afterward had shaped my way by the Road. But now was I adrift, as it might be set down, ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... and found three feet water in the hold. The pumps were choaked; by 9 A. M. they were cleared, and by this time we had eight feet water in the well, and three on the gun-deck; the ship rolled very much, and the chests, guns, and water-casks, being all cast adrift, were dashing from larboard to starboard with the greatest fury. At 10 A. M. the ship labouring so much, and her being eight streaks of her main-deck under water, abreast of her main-hatchway, so that we had very little prospect of her living two minutes above water, it was ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp

... he whispered hoarsely: "I will ring in the fire-alarm! The crew will run to quarters. The boats will be lowered. We will cut one of them adrift. In the confusion—" ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis

... interrupted by the other with a quiet rejoinder. Then suddenly he ceased altogether, and Pat, acutely conscious of the silence which descended upon them, was relieved when it was broken by sounds of laughter ahead. Still the pair above him did not speak. Each appeared to be adrift on a sea of thought the like of which he had never known. And it continued, this ominous silence, and became heavier, until he saw the ranch loom up ahead. Then he felt his mistress urge him into a canter that she might join the others for the parting. But when ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... a German, hard-fisted, bullet-headed—editor of an East Side labor-paper. Some one spoke of working-men losing their votes through being unemployed and cast adrift; and Thyrsis remembered this man's grim comment, "They lose their votes, but they don't lose their voices!" There came a young man, fair as an Antinous, who with his verbal battering-ram shook ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... adapted herself to his moods, never boring him with an over-display of interest, never chilling him with an absence of it. Her plan was to make herself necessary to him, and in part she succeeded. Thorne, lonely and cut adrift, came more and more frequently to his aunt's house and exhibited more and more decidedly his preference for his cousin's society. The thin end of the wedge was in, and but for the move to Virginia, and its ill-starred consequences, the ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... out the word with a prolonged hiss, and then—before I could even guess at his intention—there was the swift gleam of a knife, a splash of the severed painter, and caught by the tide the old boat swung out, and was adrift. ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol

... take a flying visit by rail to see Niagara Falls, returning the same evening to enjoy the proffered hospitality of a genial member of the Buffalo Bicycle Club. Seated on the piazza of his residence, on Delaware Avenue, this evening, the symphonious voice of the club-whistle is cast adrift whenever the glowing orb of a cycle-lamp heaves in sight through the darkness, and several members of the club are thus rounded up and their hearts captured by the witchery of a smile-a " smile " in Buffalo, I hasten to explain, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... beam-end and stern-way, which takes her into the grave without funeral service, or parish prayers; your dropsy is being water-logged; gout and rheumatism kill like a broken back and loose joints; indigestion is a shifting cargo, with guns adrift; the gallows is a bottomry-bond, with lawyers' fees; while fire, drowning, death by religious melancholy, and suicide, are a careless gunner, sunken rocks, false lights, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... best," the marabout said slowly, "that the two sisters go together. A man of Islam has the right to repudiate a woman who gives him no children, but I have been merciful. Now an opportunity has come to rid myself of a burden, without turning adrift one who is helpless and friendless. For my son's sake I have granted thy request; for my own sake I grant the girl's request: but both, only on one condition—that thou swearest in the name of thy God, and upon the head ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... in harmony with its occasion, so that when it is completed it shall fall back easily into the emotional key of the narrative, has been the study of the great epic poets. Milton's description of the rebel legions adrift on the flaming sea is a fine instance of the difficulty felt ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... was suggested by the dying words of John Adams, one of the crew of the English ship Bounty who in 1789 mutinied, set the captain and officers adrift, and ran the vessel to a tropical island, where they burned her. In a few years vice and violence had decimated the wicked crew, who had exempted themselves from all divine and human restraint, until the last man alive was left with only native women and ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... good Sir! when the sea runs very high this is the case, as I know, but if my authority is not enough, see Bligh's account of his run to Timor, after being cut adrift by ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron



Words linked to "Adrift" :   purposeless, planless



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