Shipwrecked Quotes & Sayings

Why do so many children love the idea of being snowed in or shipwrecked, of having to survive on one's own? When I was a child, I was no exception. I wanted to hunt with a bow and arrow like the Stone Age people: to skin deer and build my own shelter. And I desperately wanted a wolf. As we lived in London, my options were limited. — Michelle Paver

Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello. — Tom Robbins

There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. But should it come to the very last, the most important one, at this point a man must halt and stand firm if he doesn't want to begin life all over again with idle hands and a feeling of being shipwrecked. — Milan Kundera

The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas' mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting. — Jacques Roumain

If a hundred people were shipwrecked on an island, what would it even mean to say that everyone there has a "right" to food, or that everyone has a "right" to health care, or the "right" to a job, or the "right" to a "living wage"? — Larken Rose

Delusions, errors and lies are like huge, gaudy vessels, the rafters of which are rotten and worm-eaten, and those who embark in them are fated to be shipwrecked. — Gautama Buddha

It seems to me," said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, "that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that. — Zadie Smith

If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. — Henry David Thoreau

Soon only the street lamps rose clear and shone down on a mass that devoured everything, people and houses, we could not see more than three meters in front of us. The lights around us were hard to make out and Jesper stayed where he was; stretching out his arms like a blind man he said:
'This is what it must have been like when the Man from Danzig was shipwrecked. He must have been frightened. He thought he knew where everything was, and then it was all sheer chaos. Put your hand in front of your eyes, Sistermine, and spin around three times, then tell me which is the way home.'
I did as he said, I spun around so I almost fell down, I opened my eyes and peered in all directions.
'I don't know.'
'Then anything can happen. — Per Petterson

He is foolish to blame the sea that is shipwrecked twice. — Publilius Syrus

Our body is a ship that sails on deep blue waters. What is our goal? To be shipwrecked! — Nikos Kazantzakis

Very few persons, comparatively, know how to Desire with sufficient intensity. They do not know what it is to feel and manifest that intense, eager, longing, craving, insistent, demanding, ravenous Desire which is akin to the persistent, insistent, ardent, overwhelming desire of the drowning man for a breath of air; of the shipwrecked or desert-lost man for a drink of water; of the famished man for bread and meat. — Robert Collier

My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young. — Willa Cather

Knowing when and how to change course is important to success. Self-doubt is a lighthouse that will keep you from running aground. Don't become shipwrecked on the rocks of time. Be willing to rethink your decisions and change course. — Harley King

Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success
but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity. — Soren Kierkegaard

How I should have raised all her terrible destruction to the surface like a shipwrecked boat dredged up from the sea floor. But that would have given the fracture a shape, a dimension--a definite perimeter to the ruin. This way has a subtle cruelty. This way will torment. She will spend years trying to map the rift she caused and sound the damage. She will push on the bruise and grow frantic trying to repair the creeping remoteness. It is the unkindest thing I have ever done. And I will not relent. I will not do otherwise. — Priya Parmar

I want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose, Drinking fresh mango juice. Goldfish shoals, nibbling at my toes. Fun fun fun in the sun sun sun. Fun fun fun in the sun sun sun. — Howard Goodall

Each time he uttered the word 'Monsieur' in his mild, compassionable voice, the man's face lighted up. The courtesy, to the ex-convict, was like fresh water to a shipwrecked man. Ignominy thirsts for respect. — Victor Hugo

When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of "all sorts of shipwrecked humanity," they lost confidence in its political capacity.8 — Matthew Desmond

There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one's self: 'A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast, bids you set sail. Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost, weathered the gal. — William James

Any denomination or church group that forsakes inerrancy will end up shipwrecked. It is impossible to prevent the surrender of other important doctrinal teachings of the Word of God when inerrancy is gone. — Francis Schaeffer

The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on. — Jenny Offill

Even in a world that's being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong. — Hildegard Of Bingen

I am a shipwrecked man who fears every sea. — Ovid

More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That's how much I love you.
I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.
As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That's how much you I love.
I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks,
I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.
I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes,
That's how you're loved by me. — Ogden Nash

He'd never encountered beauty of such magnitude and intensity. It was not allure, but grace, like the sight of land to a shipwrecked man. And he, who hadn't been on a capsized vessel since he was six - and that had only been an overturned canoe - suddenly felt as if he'd been adrift in the open ocean his entire life.
Someone spoke to him. He couldn't make out a single word.
There was something elemental to her beauty, like a mile-high thunderhead, a gathering avalanche, or a Bengal tiger prowling the darkness of the jungle. A phenomenon of inherent danger and overwhelming perfection.
He felt a sharp, sweet ache in his chest: His life would never again be complete without her. But he felt no fear, only excitement, wonder, and desire.
Christian's thoughts upon seeing Venetia for the first time (Beguiling the Beauty, Fitzhugh Trilogy 1, by Sherry Thomas) — Sherry Thomas

If you tend to focus on the particular events in your life, try to put things into perspective. When you do, you'll be able to share the philosophy of someone such as the apostle Paul, who was able to say, "I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content."3 And that was saying a lot, considering that Paul had been shipwrecked, whipped, beaten, stoned, and imprisoned. Throughout everything, his faith enabled him to maintain perspective. He realized that as long as he was doing what he was supposed to do, his being labeled success or failure by others really didn't matter. — John C. Maxwell

I prayed for guidance, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament," he went on, "and as I sat in the silence of the chapel, I seemed to see you as a shipwrecked traveler. And it seems to me that that is a good parallel to your present situation, is it not? Imagine such a soul, Madame, suddenly cast away in a strange land, bereft of friends and familiarity, without resources save what the new land can provide. Such a happening is disaster, truly, and yet may be the opening for great opportunity and blessings. What if the new land shall be rich? New friends may be made, and a new life begun. — Diana Gabaldon

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety. — Ben Hecht

In all human love it must be realized that every man promises a woman, and every woman promises a man that which only God alone can give, namely, perfect happiness. One of the reasons why so many marriages are shipwrecked is because as the young couple leave the altar, they fail to realize that human feelings tire and the enthusiasm of the honeymoon is not the same as the more solid happiness of enduring human love. One of the greatest trials of marriage is the absence of solitude. In the first moments of human love, one does not see the little hidden deformities which later on appear. — Fulton J. Sheen

We are still tossed about by the disturbances of this life, which is like a stormy sea, where those who are not attached to J[esus] C[hrist] and the duties of their state, as was our dear departed, are shipwrecked. — Vincent De Paul

All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Mr. Micawber pressed my hand, and groaned, and afterwards shed tears. I was greatly touched, and disappointed too, for I had expected that we should be quite gay on this happy and long-looked-for occasion. But Mr. and Mrs. Micawber were so used to their old difficulties, I think, that they felt quite shipwrecked when they came to consider that they were released from them. All their elasticity was departed, and I never saw them half so wretched as on this night; insomuch that when the bell rang, and Mr. Micawber walked with me to the lodge, and parted from me there with a blessing, I felt quite afraid to leave him by himself, he was so profoundly miserable. — Charles Dickens

He thanked her and left the house in the mood of a shipwrecked man who has allowed the rescue ship to pass him by. — Audrey Niffenegger

These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from "suspended animation," that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not. The fear of being buried alive was a serious concern at this time. Many, like Washington on his deathbed, asked that their bodies not be immediately interred in case they might be suffering from suspended animation. — Gordon S. Wood

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

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.] — Virginia Woolf

Rescue my shipwrecked heart. Come — Julia London

If you're shipwrecked on an island with 10 million dollars and your wife has gold and diamonds, but there's no water, no arable land, no fish, you have nothing. Money is a 'nothing' thing. — Jacque Fresco

If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre? — James Joyce

For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly familiar and trustworthily physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we realize that we are like shipwrecked people trying to keep their balance on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whether they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment. — Albert Einstein

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot
the sail he has seen. — Jean Genet

A romance is never just a romance, there's adventure, mystery and movement.

You need a grand, dramatic setting - the Swiss Alps were always an personal favourite of mine - and a chance meeting, on a train, a cruise, or perhaps the hero and heroine find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island.

The men are normally rich, well-to-do - but never vulgar with their money. Young men lack the maturity to take control so an older man is essential to provide the reassurance the heroine's needs.

There's always a fair amount of turbulence before he sweeps in to save the day. A happy ending is an absolute must. — Ida Pollock

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)] — Edmund Burke

A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world - the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities.

As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already has grave risks.

But since society, without knowing it, is starvingfor the inner, the demands on people to evoke it in a "safe" way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous - while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long... — R.D. Laing

Light, why did the Pattern have to catch me up with you? Why couldn't I have something safe and simple, like being shipwrecked with no food and a dozen hungry Aielmen? — Robert Jordan

And this is the simple truth
that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. — Soren Kierkegaard

Suppose a man falls among thieves, or wild beasts; is shipwrecked at sea by a sudden gale; is killed by a falling house or tree. Suppose another man wandering through the desert finds help in his straits; having been tossed by the waves, reaches harbor; miraculously escapes death by a finger's breadth. Carnal reason ascribes all such happenings, whether prosperous or adverse, to fortune. But anyone who has been taught by Christ's lips that all the hairs of his head are numbered [Matt. 10:30] will look farther afield for a cause, and will consider that all events are governed by God's secret plan. — John Calvin

(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in the god damn boat, he'd want to know who the guy that was rowing it before he'd even get in. — J.D. Salinger

He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything. — Graham Greene

At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow. — Gustave Flaubert

I was shipwrecked before I got aboard. — Seneca The Younger

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land. — Henry David Thoreau

His youth reappeared, bringing with it all those sweet souvenirs which are rather perfumes than thoughts. Between that past and the present there was an abyss. But imagination has the angel's or lightning's wing; it clears seas in which we should certainly have been shipwrecked; it removes the darkness in which our illusions were lost, the precipice where our happiness was engulfed. — Alexandre Dumas

Analogy and probability are not bedrock; they are lifeboats in an ocean of doubt, and sometimes they founder. So rhetoric tends to the passionate:we argue, not with surety, but as the shipwrecked clinging to the only thing they have. — Andrew J. Patrick

A widow is like a frigate of which the first captain has been shipwrecked. — Alphonse Karr

A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could have only one book, what would it be? I always say, How to Build a Boat. — Stephen Wright

Maya, Indian goddess of illusions. Siren of shipwrecked sailors. If only you lactated Pinot Noir, you'd be perfect. — Rex Pickett

We're all shipwrecked on this idea that everything has to be explained. — Shane Koyczan

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds. — Marcel Proust

I'm glad being shipwrecked appeals to you."
"Captain Walken made a point of avoiding that word."
"Well, he was trying to keep everyone jolly, wasn't he. It's no good having everyone running around screaming and eating each other."
"I wouldn't run around screaming," she said. "I can see eating someone in a pinch, though. If it really came down to it, I mean."
"I don't doubt it."
"Come on, Matt Cruse, don't you find it just a bit exciting, being here?"
"No."
She looked at me as if I'd suggested we stop breathing for a few hours. — Kenneth Oppel

And I see the houses of the human race perched on the edge of the sea, shipwrecked in their false neighborliness. — Italo Calvino

My mother smoked too but I guessed by now she had quit the habit, which was, I supposed, one of the advantages of being shipwrecked. — Polly Horvath

Jesus is all we have; he is all we need and all we want. We are shipwrecked on God and stranded on omnipotence! — Vance Havner

Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love. — Andy Gibb

A soul so pitiably forlorn, If such do on this earth abide, May season apathy with scorn, May turn indifference to pride; And still be not unblest- compared With him who grovels, self-debarred From all that lies within the scope Of holy faith and christian hope; Or, shipwrecked, kindles on the coast False fires, that others may be lost. — William Wordsworth

He sees the land of meaning, and one path to it, and the so-called "normal" people traveling swiftly and in comfort to the land; he does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning. — Janet Frame

It's like, I'm scared and there're a lot of ugly things, but I'd rather be shipwrecked on this lovely island than safe in a sad, gray cell. — Corey Ann Haydu

If animals had a Pope," Major Thompson said to me, "their Vatican would be in London. And if by some dire submarine cataclysm that noble vessel, Great Britain, were to be shipwrecked and start to founder, believe me, there would surely be somebody in Westminster to cry from the top of the Tower: "Dogs first! — Pierre Daninos

We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard. — Karl Barth

His words are like seawater to the shipwrecked: I'm tempted to drink them in, and at the same time, they feel dangerously deceptive. — Kerry Kletter

With rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss; To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light, certainly, but a great comfort to cast-away sailors and shipwrecked ones!
By diverse ways and wendings did I arrive at my truth; not by one ladder did I mount to the height where mine eye roveth into my remoteness. And unwillingly only did I ask my way - that was always counter to my taste! Rather did I question and test the ways themselves.
A testing and a questioning hath been all my travelling: and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however - is my taste: Neither a good nor a bad taste, but my taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy.
"This is now my way - where is yours?" Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way." For "the way" - it doth not exist! — Friedrich Nietzsche

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean. — John Banville

My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, "How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!" The relative of five hundred years back would have said "How Holy! — Elizabeth Von Arnim

He seemed a little uneasy, and he welcomed me with something of the gratitude of the shipwrecked mariner who sights a sail. — P.G. Wodehouse

Are we not all shipwrecked, ... condemned to death? ... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults ... — Henri Frederic Amiel

He felt as if he had been shipwrecked on the Titanic, but in the nick of time had been rescued. By the Lusitania — Terry Pratchett

It's about the terror of an ordinary life" or "It's the story of a man shipwrecked in his own mind." But — Joe Hill

At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. — Henry David Thoreau

The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked. — Thomas Hartwell Horne

This is how it starts, among the closed circles of the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged: jealousy, dissention, a breach in the groupthink walls. Then the entry of the foe, the murderer, the shadow slipping in through the door we forgot to lock because we were distracted by our darker selves: nursing our minor hatreds, indulging our petty resentments, yelling at one another, tossing the crockery. — Margaret Atwood

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

They sat side by side, sad and weary, like shipwrecked sailors on a deserted shore. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence. — Per Petterson