Steamer Quotes & Sayings

She came to a little wrecked pleasure-steamer, which had become embedded in the mud several summers ago and which no one had bothered to remove. It had been a vulgar, tubby little boat when it used to steam through the water with its handful of holiday-makers, giving shrill whistles at every bend and causing a wash that disturbed the fishermen as they sat peacefully on the banks; but, now it lay sideways in the mud with its gaudy paint all bleached, it was almost beautiful. — Barbara Comyns

It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother's escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thimas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him. — Michael Chabon

Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of the steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees or church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a human stride. — H.G.Wells

Pay little attention to discouragement as possible. Plough ahead as a steamer does, rough or smooth - rain or shine. To carry your cargo and make your port is the point. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

--
"Don't roach me, funker," she said. "And don't shirk off in your
electro-steamer. This mopsy wants to poke."
--Mack Reynolds, _Commune 2000 A.D._, 1974 — Mack Reynolds

There is an ancient saying,' noted Ironflanks, 'originating, I believe, from you fastbloods. The truth will set you free.'
'No, old steamer,' said the commodore. 'In my experience, the truth will get you sent to the bottom of the ocean with an anchor chain wrapped around your legs to buy your silence. But it's the truth I need, all the same. — Stephen Hunt

French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast — Joseph Conrad

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England? — John Masefield

A steamer is like an inhaler, so you can inhale this oil or frankincense or eucalyptus. Before I go onstage, I spend half an hour taking in that steam, and it saves my life! — Rita Ora

In vogue and cosmopolitan they clutch their Pomeranians and walk among the millionaires or watch from swayback steamer chairs — Allan Wolf

I always bring my Jiffy Esteam steamer to get the wrinkles out of our clothes. It's powerful enough to press a suit. — Jesse Tyler Ferguson

The sea has no sense and no pity. If the steamer had been smaller and not made of thick iron, the waves would have crushed it to pieces without the slightest compunction, and would have devoured all the people in it with no distinction of saints or sinners. The steamer had the same cruel and meaningless expression. This monster with its huge beak was dashing onwards, cutting millions of waves in its path; it had no fear of the darkness nor the wind, nor of space, nor of solitude, caring for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, this monster would have crushed them, too, without distinction of saints or sinners. — Anton Chekhov

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral. — Iain Sinclair

You look so out of your element. (Savitar)
I am out of my element. Much like you in a Seattle Goth club. (Acheron)
I'm never out of my element, Atlantean. And it must be dire indeed to get you in shorties, and on a board. One day I'm actually going to get you to say 'Rad four-mill steamer, dude! (Savitar) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books ... On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours. — Garrison Keillor

The Tigris in parts is wonderfully tortuous, and at one great bend, 'The Devil's Elbow,' a man on foot can walk the distance in less than an hour which takes the steamer four hours to accomplish. — Isabella Bird

Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter it stares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride with her pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom's sleeve. Up from the gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts its weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some petted Princeling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying, wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness. Across the slender white rail of an always out-going steamer it stings back into your gray, land-locked consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray. And the secret of the face, of course, is "Lure"; but to save your soul you could not decide in any specific case whether the lure is the lure of personality, or the lure of physiognomy - a mere accidental, coincidental, haphazard harmony of forehead and cheek-bone and twittering facial muscles. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Jeff: I understand you guys had a good day today?
Peanut: Yes we had a great day!
Jose: No we did not.
Peanut: Yes
Jose: No
Peanut: Yes
Jose: No
Peanut: Yes
Jose: No we did not have a good day.
Peanut: Yes we hhhaad...a great frickin' day!
What?
Jeff: Did you have a good day?
Peanut: Yes
Jose: No
Peanut: Shut up
Jeff: A good day?
Peanut: Yes
Jose: No
Peanut: Shut up
Jeff: You're supposed to have taken him to the spa.
Peanut: I took him to the spa!
Jose: He put me in the vegetable steamer.
Peanut: It's the same thing!!! — Jeff Dunham

For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist's satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender heads, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorned a Cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship's hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing by the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering. — Marcel Proust

I had no need of sails to drive me, nor oars nor wheels to push me, nor rails to give me a faster road. Air is what I wanted, that was all. Air surrounds me as water surrounds the submarine boat, and in it my propellers act like the screws of a steamer. That is how I solved the problem of aviation. That is what a balloon will never do, nor will any machine that is lighter than air. — Jules Verne

He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt — Henryk Sienkiewicz

Pulling a Houdini
Relationships are magic;
we're always getting each other out of handcuffs and strait-jackets
while locked in a steamer trunk underwater. — Beryl Dov

I have observed, on board a steamer, how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation, because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility, and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea. — Rabindranath Tagore

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toilo. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would before an enthousiastic outbreak in a madhouse. — Joseph Conrad

Journeys up the Metaphoric River are hugely enjoyable and highly recommended. Since every genre is nourished by its heady waters, a paddle steamer can take even the most walk-shy tourists to their chosen destination. As a bonus, there is traditionally at least one murder on board each trip
a "consideration" to the head steward will ensure that it is not you. — Jasper Fforde

I don't have any great first job tales: I've never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me. — Mary Gordon

Of all the ships that have been devoted to biological explorations of the sea, none has surpassed the endeavors conducted on board the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries steamer Albatross, during her 39 years of service from 1882 to 1921. — Paul Bartsch

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasent. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place to be compared to Chicage; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, sonce there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men; and is thinking of the things that devide men - diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men - hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky. — G.K. Chesterton

Jocelyn: 'I've dated a few nice boys. Though if things got serious, I ended it. I didn't want to involve some poor guy in all the stuff I was carrying around.'

Noah: 'Excess baggage, you mean?'

Jocelyn: 'More like three suitcases, a couple of steamer trunks, and a carry-on. — Kate Kae Myers

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower. — Alice McDermott

When you go from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river, and then you don't see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland.
-'City of Robots',1986 — Umberto Eco

question. On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from — Jules Verne

I pat my mule's neck and find comfort in the silky tufts of her mane. Father told me not to brood when people judged me for my wrapper, not my filling, or I would spend my whole life in the steamer. — Stacey Lee

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up. — John Updike

Everything, it said, was against the travellers, every obstacle imposed alike by man and by nature. A miraculous agreement of the times of departure and arrival, which was impossible, was absolutely necessary to his success. He might, perhaps, reckon on the arrival of trains at the designated hours, in Europe, where the distances were relatively moderate; but when he calculated upon crossing India in three days, and the United States in seven, could he rely beyond misgiving upon accomplishing his task? There were accidents to machinery, the liability of trains to run off the line, collisions, bad weather, the blocking up by snow - were not all these against Phileas Fogg? Would he not find himself, when travelling by steamer in winter, at the mercy of the winds and fogs? — Jules Verne

Ancient, grizzled, wild-eyed, emaciated by fever, dragged his weary frame up the veranda steps and collapsed in a steamer-chair. Whisky and soda kept him going while he made report and turned in his accounts. — Jack London

A great number of soundings, mainly along the continental slope of the New England States were also taken by the vessels of the United States Fish Commission. Important soundings were made by the United States Fish Commission steamer ALBATROSS in the Caribbean, during the winter of 1883-1884. — Alexander Agassiz

Must the Earth forever be arranged like an ocean steamer, with large, luxurious rooms and luxurious food for a select few, and underneath in the steerage, where the great mass can barely breathe from dirt and the poisonous air? — Various

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. — David Benioff

His gaze glossed over a stack of wooden crates and landed on a steamer trunk that was covered with stickers from all over the world. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

I'm a mezzo-soprano, so the whole diva thing ... I'm not the kind of performer who puts on a persona off-stage as well, and the days of arriving with steamer trunks and hat boxes are over. — Joyce DiDonato

Men will tell you sometimes that "money's hard." That shows it was not made to eat, I say ... Some of those who sank with the steamer the other day found out that money was heavy too. — Henry David Thoreau

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air ... It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability. — George Bernard Shaw

The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth's part in life, and a day moth's at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. — Virginia Woolf