Shipwreck Quotes & Sayings

Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing. — Emma Donoghue

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down. — Jean Anouilh

Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things. — William James

But here, two thousand miles from home, there was a real shipwreck, a real hope. A choice big enough to change our lives forever. — Gordon Korman

Good preservation is a life preserver thrown to us in a shipwreck. Good preservation keeps us in touch with the graces of this life. It's bricks and mortar, yes. It's arguments about true colors and authenticity and representation. But true preservation is like the hand that shelters a fire from the wind. It protects the spark of life.
Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax, Twice — Howard Mansfield

Society in shipwreck is comfort to all. — Publilius Syrus

The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to
even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. — Stephen Crane

We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot. — Henry Ward Beecher

In our civilization there are fearful hours - such are those when the criminal law pronounces shipwreck upon a man. What a mournful moment is that in which society withdraws itself and gives up a thinking being forever. — Victor Hugo

Shipwreck? Snow Job? I know. Firefly. I sort of feel a connection to him. Can't explain it. — Richard Castle

I have pondered on the causes of a life's shipwreck. I think that our lives are worse than the mind's quality would warrant. There are many who know virtue. We know the good, we apprehend it clearly. But we can't bring it to achievement. — Euripides

My daughter," I said blankly. "I see. Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought
it took a man, as well as a woman, to make a child. Is this infant's father to
be a crab, or a seagull maybe? Or were you planning to shipwreck some likely
sailor on my doorstep, so I can make convenient use of him? — Juliet Marillier

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it. — Pablo Picasso

To name her is to sink her," he told me. "That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck. — Neal Shusterman

In the shipwreck of life - for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes — Alexandre Dumas

Father and daughter stand before the ship. She looks like a naval vessel. The red star glitters on the funnel. I look immediately at the lettering Proleterka. Blackened, patches of rust, forgotten. Sovereign lettering. The dusk is falling. The ship is large, she hides the sun that is about to sink into the water. She is darkness, pitch and mystery. A privateer built like a fortress, she has survived stormy weather and shipwreck. We go up the gangplank. The officers are waiting for us. We are the last. — Fleur Jaeggy

Personally, I don't think that having a water goddess for an ancestress is a guarantee of freedom against seasickness, nor come to that, shipwreck. — Philippa Gregory

So wait a minute. I go looking for the story of the guy who wrote this awesome wind scale tha tblew my mind. I start reading about his life, and before he's sixteen years old I've already run across a family's flight from the poorhouse, an early balloon flight, an eccentric father, a young man at sea, Malay pirates, shipwreck, castaways, buried treasure, and Captain Bligh, fresh off the mutiny on the Bounty. Not a single word about the wind, but honestly, at this point, who cares? — Scott Huler

The Infinite
It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea. — Giacomo Leopardi

Society in shipwreck is a comfort to all. — Publilius Syrus

I'd always felt like I was going to take part in adventures in my life. That's what led me to diving in the shipwreck to begin with. But when you're faced with your own demise, you have to accept that you are vulnerable and that you are only here for a set period of time. — Phil Keoghan

But it ain't our feelings we have to steer by through life
no, no, we'd make shipwreck mighty often if we did that. There's only the one safe compass and we've got to set our course by that
what it's right to do. — L.M. Montgomery

For mankind you've made your wintry bed.
A shipwreck of your own mortality — Marie Symeou

A friend of Diagoras pointed out an expensive display of votive gifts and said, 'You think the gods have no care for man? Why, you can see from all these votive pictures here how many people have escaped the fury of storms at sea by praying to the gods who have brought them safe to harbor.'
To which Diagoras replied, 'Yes, indeed, but where are the pictures of all those who suffered shipwreck and perished in the waves? — Diagoras Of Melos

Her virtues, graced with external gifts, Do breed love's settled passions in my heart; And like as rigour of tempestuous gusts Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide, So am I driven by breath of her renown Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive Where I may have fruition of her love. — William Shakespeare

You know," I tease, "you still haven't told me why you're here. You were ... passing by? Wanted
to brag about getting a week off from school?"
"Oh. Uh, right." Josh sort of laughs and glances out my window. "I was just wondering if you
wanted to go out."
Holy.
Shit.
"I'm on my way to Album," he continues, referring to a nearby comics shop. "Since we were
talking about that new Sfar earlier, I thought if you weren't busy, you might want to come along."
... Oh.
My heart beats like a cracked-out drummer. Josh, don't do that to a lady. I'm still clutching the
book about the shipwreck, so I set it down to wipe my sweaty palms. "Sure". — Stephanie Perkins

Voyaging begins when one burns one's boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck. — Michel Serres

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism. — Josef Skvorecky

She was around two. She and Laura went down in a shipwreck. I heard Henry didn't eat or sleep for days. He searched for them for weeks, but there was never any sign of them. There were no survivors." "How sad," she whispered. He touched her chin and turned her liquid eyes toward him. "Don't cry. It happened a long time ago. I'm sure Henry is over it all by now." "Love like that never dies." He smiled. "Such romanticism. No wonder you read poetry." "Does he ever talk about them?" He released her chin and shook his head. "Clara would be in tears if he did. The servants tell how he raved like a madman when he heard the news. Molly said she'd never heard a grown man cry like that. — Colleen Coble

In the name of God, Monsieur, let us have greater confidence in Him than we do; let us allow Him to steer our little bark; if it is useful and pleasing to Him, He will save it from shipwreck. — Vincent De Paul

People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectations of shipwreck, sun, and death. The liners the little white girl knew were among the last mailboats in the world. It was while she was young that the first airlines were started, which were gradually to deprive mankind of journeys across the sea. (The Lover) — Marguerite Duras

Life itself is a sea full of reefs and maelstroms that a human being takes the greatest care and caution to avoid; he uses all his efforts and ingenuity to wend his way through, while knowing that even if he is successful, every step brings him closer to the greatest, the total, the inescapable and irreparable shipwreck, and in fact steers him right up to it, - to death: this is the final goal of the miserable journey and worse for him that all the reefs he managed to avoid. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life. — Sylvia Earle

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
[On Water] — Guy De Maupassant

Often it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don't drown in the metaphor. — Robert Breault

It would appear to a quoting dilettante - i.e., one of those writers and scholars who fill up their texts with phrases from some dead authority - that, as phrased by Hobbes, "from like antecedents flow like consequents." Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship's captain:
"But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident ... of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort." E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS
Titanic Captain Smith's ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too. — Rachel Cusk

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me. — Anne Carson

Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint, but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a light-house.
[Letter to his wife, 17 July 1757, after narrowly avoiding a shipwreck; often misquoted as "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."] — Benjamin Franklin

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below. — Sarah Dessen

How do we imagine a great love?
Perhaps something along the lines of Gone with the Wind or Titanic is what comes to mind. But those aren't really about love itself, but about a situation. Everything becomes more grand when it takes place in the context of a civil war, a shipwreck, or natural catastrophe. But that is like judging the painting by the frame. That the Mona Lisa should be judged a masterpiece largely because of the carvings that surround it.
Love is love. In the dramatic stories, the people involved are physically willing to give up their lives for each other, but that is exactly what happens in the great but everyday love also. You give your lives to each other the whole way and every day, until death. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice. — Henry David Thoreau

I'm very resourceful. I'd be good in prison. I'd be good in a shipwreck. I'd make a great hostage. — David Letterman

[ ... ] the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul. — Pablo Neruda

All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily agreed upon by the parties to it, for the protection of their rights against wrong-doers. In its voluntary character it is precisely similar to an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck. — Lysander Spooner

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my languish and restore the light; With dark forgetting of my care return. And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth: Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn Without the torment of the night's untruth. — Samuel Daniel

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge.
Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left. — Milan Kundera

We kissed for a bit and I stopped shaking. We played with each other for a long time, and after we had joined, my cock and her fanny became one thing, then it seemed to vanish as we took off on a big psychic trip together. It was our souls and our minds that were doing it all; our genitals, our bodies, they were just launch pads and were soon superfluous as we went around the universe together on our shared trip, moving in and out of each other's heads and finding nothing in them but good things, nothing in them but love. The intensity increased until it became almost unbearable and we exploded together in an orgasmic crash-landing onto the shipwreck of a bed, from a long way out in some form of space. We held each other tightly, drenched in sweat and shaking with emotion — Irvine Welsh

An old man said, We are not condemned because of our thoughts that enter us, but because we use our thoughts badly; our thoughts can cause us either to suffer shipwreck or to be crowned. — Poemen

THRILLING NARRATIVES OF MUTINY, MURDER AND PIRACY, A WEIRD SERIES OF Tales of Shipwreck and Disaster, FROM THE EARLIEST PART OF THE CENTURY TO THE PRESENT TIME, WITH ACCOUNTS OF Providential Escapes AND HEART-RENDING FATALITIES. — Anonymous

By the time she was fifteen, the age she was the day of the shipwreck, opinions by the dozen landed in each hollow track left by her feet. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

I am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. — R. Buckminster Fuller

The moon splits open.
We move through, waterbirds rising
to look for another lake.
Or say we are living in a love-ocean,
where trust works to caulk our body-boat,
to make it last a little while,
until the inevitable shipwreck,
the total marriage, the death-union.
Dissolve in friendship,
like two drunkards fighting.
Do not look for justice here
in the jungle where your animal soul
gives you bad advice.
Drink enough wine so that you stop talking.
You are a lover, and love is a tavern
where no one makes much sense.
Even if the things you say are poems
as dense as sacks of Solomon's gold,
they become pointless. — Rumi

I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair, but I've learned the devil a lot in the last five minutes. — Erik Larson

Hope starts as a promise made to yourself, the first drop of rain in a parched land, the first step onto dry earth for a shipwreck survivor. It is a listening crowd for a lonely heart.
What we hope in must be greater than us; therefore, we will always need something greater than man to believe in. Good and evil may be a necessity to perceive our world, but hope is a prerequisite for life. — Christopher Hawke

The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea. — Ovid

The most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. - These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible. — Erich Maria Remarque

The sceptic, when he plunges into the depths of infidelity, like the miser who leaps from the shipwreck, will find that the treasures which he bears about him will only sink him deeper in the abyss. — Charles Caleb Colton

They did not suffer shipwreck because the entrepreneurs were not public-spirited, as the socialist-etatistic legend has it. They were bound to fail because the economic organization based upon division of labour and private property in the means of production can function only so long as price-determination in the market is free. — Ludwig Von Mises

Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Reserve some hours daily to examine yourself and fortune; for if you embark yourself in perpetual conversation or recreation, you will certainly shipwreck your mind and fortune. — Anne Of Austria

Each of them had personal, real or imagined, but deep reasons for dissatisfaction with life. Furthermore they had one great reason in common; both felt themselves to be unhappy and like outcasts in this town and this society of officers, for the most part frivolous and empty-headed. So they clung to one another feverishly like two survivors of a shipwreck. — Ivo Andric

The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death. — Joseph Conrad

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time. — Francis Bacon

Rosamund, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own
hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect
could find no words, but involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea's forehead which was very near her, and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck. — George Eliot

Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlike
A lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,
My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck. — Paul Verlaine

The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck. — Thomas More

If he was dull as a statesman he was more dull in private life, and it may be imagined that such a woman as his wife would find some difficulty in making his society the source of her happiness. Their marriage, in a point of view regarding business, had been a complete success, - and a success, too, when on the one side, that of Lady Glencora, there had been terrible dangers of shipwreck, and when on his side also there had been some little fears of a mishap. — Anthony Trollope

Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself. — Marcel Duchamp

A proper sense of proportion leaves no room for superstition. A man says, "I have never been in a shipwreck," and becoming nervous touches wood. Why is he nervous? He has this paragraph before his eyes: "Among the deceased was Mr. - . By a remarkable coincidence this gentleman had been saying only a few days before that he had never been in a shipwreck. Little did he think that his next voyage would falsify his words so tragically." It occurs to him that he has read paragraphs like that again and again. Perhaps he has. Certainly he has never read a paragraph like this: "Among the deceased was Mr. - . By a remarkable coincidence this gentleman had never made the remark that he had not yet been in a shipwreck." Yet that paragraph could have been written truthfully thousands of times. — A.A. Milne

Because our hearts are unprepared for truth, we cling to the deception as a shipwreck victim on a storm-tossed sea will grab at anything that floats. But the splintered rubble of our broken trust - those temporary buoys of our shattered dreams - betray us, gouging rough gashes into our souls, drawing our blood and leaving us to sink. — Penelope J. Stokes

It has been said that men carry on a kind of coasting trade with religion. In the voyage of life, they profess to be in search of heaven, but take care not to venture so far in their approximations to it, as entirely to lose sight of the earth; and should their frail vessel be in danger of shipwreck, they will gladly throw their darling vices overboard, as other mariners their treasures, only to fish them up again when the storm is over. — Charles Caleb Colton

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The romantic chivalric tradition takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars. — J.R.R. Tolkien

If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage? — Charles Caleb Colton

He wrongly accuses Neptune, who makes shipwreck a second time. — Publilius Syrus

None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do. — Alexander McCall Smith

He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing. — Robert Farrar Capon

It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts. — Michael Chabon

The Church had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened with shipwreck. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

Brought up a Presbyterian, indoctrinated from the Catechism, and being naturally of an inquiring mind, I fell a ready prey to the logic of infidelity, as soon as I began to think for myself. But that which at first threatened to be the utter shipwreck of faith in God and the Bible was, under God's providence, over-ruled for good, and merely wrecked my confidence in human creed and systems of Bible misinterpretations. — Charles Taze Russell

Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land. — Jeanette Winterson

Shipwreck in youth is sorrowful enough, but one looks for storms at the spring equinox. Yet it is the September equinox that drowns. — Helen Waddell

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck. — Charles Caleb Colton

It's better to think of my life like that - part miracle, part madness. It's better if I accept that I can't control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide. — Jeanette Winterson

In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity. — Norbert Wiener

In simply thinking his name, an iceberg of frozen emotions loomed on my horizon. Everything I knew about icebergs I learned from the Titanic.: You saw the tip of the iceberg floating in the water but what you didn't see was all that lurked beneath the surface. I didn't want - and I couldn't afford - another shipwreck in my life. — Judith Fertig

If one tries to navigate unknown waters one runs the risk of shipwreck — Albert Einstein

There is a shipwreck between your ribs and it took eighteen years
for me to understand how to understand your kind of drowning.
There are people who cannot be held quietly. There are screams
that are never externalized. If I looked at the photo albums of your
past twenty years, all I would find are decibel meter graphs of
phone calls and the intensity of your silence as you sat
smoking cigarettes in the garage.
There is a shipwreck between your ribs. You are a box with
fragile written on it, and so many people have not handled you
with care.
And for the first time, I understand that I will never know
how to apologize for being
one of them. — Shinji Moon

You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you. Believe me, I know from my own experience that the Master knows you and each of his pupils much better than we know ourselves. He reads in the souls of his pupils more than they care to admit. — Eugen Herrigel

A lot of times high school felt like a shipwreck. A social shipwreck with everyone in desperate survival mode and only one lifeboat. Everyone fighting for a seat, clinging to the sides and beating each other with oars to keep their spot. I can't stand that kind of chaos, when people create drama for the sake of it. — Suanne Laqueur

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck. — Guy De Maupassant

She holds you like a whore in the night, but she'll take your soul and not think twice. — Micheal Rivers

I stalk certain words ... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives ... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them ... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves ... Everything exists in the word. — Pablo Neruda

Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war, felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary. — William Shakespeare

The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven. — Pope John Paul II

The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation - if you're in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood. — Mark Helprin

Only that which cannot be lost in a shipwreck is yours. — Al-Ghazali

He blames Neptune unjustly who twice suffers shipwreck. — Publilius Syrus

Her hands clung to my neck; they would not have held me so fast in a shipwreck. And I did not understand whether she wanted me to save her or to drown with her. — Raymond Radiguet