Cast Adrift Quotes & Sayings

It is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea's repose; I pass from waking agonies ... to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort. — Iain Banks

But when he heard news of her engagement to another man, Nathaniel was cast utterly adrift. Sinking deeper and deeper into a violent depression, he'd come up with a list of three possible plans over several jugs of ale at the local tavern.

One. Kill W. Shaw.
Two. Kidnap D. Makepiece (until she concedes her mistake).
Three. Kill W. Shaw.

He was never a very great schemer. — Jayne Fresina

Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer. — Douglas Coupland

But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf, not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes
a gulf, subject to tempest, and fear, and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious. — Washington Irving

The first time I goofed out on Heroin was 1985. It was like sinking into a sea of warm marmalade. And once submerged in its sickly sweet balm I was cast adrift in a universe of dreams. And in the middle of vacant, non-existence I had found freedom. The outside world was no longer my enemy because my final tenuous connection with it had been severed forever. — U.V. Ray

Henceforth, whenever we are threatened with being cast adrift upon love's transcendent, golden shore, I want you to slap my face. — Amanda Quick

Sometimes I have experienced God in extraordinary ways - in dramatic surprises or soul-expanding insights or unexplainable mystical encounters. More often, I have felt God's reality in the simple encouragement of a friend, in the gentle inspiration of a sermon, or in the familiar ritual of the Eucharist and I'd be less than honest if I didn't also say that at times, I've found myself in the spiritual doldrums, cast adrift, wondering if the wind would ever blow again. — Brian D. McLaren

It's one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind's
still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete. — David Foster Wallace

When one removes this factor by surgical repair, the patient is cast adrift from the more or less acceptable emotional protection it has offered and soon he finds, to his surprise and discomfort, that life is not all smooth sailing even for those with unblemished, "ordinary" faces. He is unprepared to cope with this situation without the support of a "handicap," and he may turn to the less simple, but similar, protection of the behavior patterns of neurasthenia, hysterical conversion, hypochondriasis or the acute anxiety states.17 — Erving Goffman

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all. — Stuart A. Kauffman

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered. — Michael Richardson

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time. — Greg Weisman

An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing's tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight's powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Darkness
I find myself set upon a ship of fools and cast adrift.
Adrift in sea of madness, steaming towards a storm of uncertainty.
Overboard, swirling, twirling tumbling.
Engulfed in madness.
Shipwrecked, marooned.
Washed upon a rock of hope.
Darkness surrounds.
Within the darkness madness laps upon a distant shore.
Morning breaks and sun rises once more.
Darkness retreats into the shadows.
Golden rays of light cleanse the mind and soul.
A new day dawns heralding sanity, and hope
for the human race once more. — Michael Tianias