Quotes & Sayings About Wrecks

Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed. — Hannah Whitall Smith

Our economy continues to struggle with slow economic growth, high unemployment and stagnant wages. "Obama care's" raising costs. That's making it harder for small businesses to hire. In short, it's a train wreck. — John Boehner

Well, I've been in a few car wrecks. — Dave Matthews

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment. — William Dean Howells

Depressed people tended to end things on special occasions and party goers drank too much and then got behind the wheels of vehicles. But Valentine's Day wasn't too bad as far as suicides and car wrecks were concerned. — Abbi Glines

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know its happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you 'sir'. It just happens. — Robert McCammon

In your life's journey, there will be excitement and fulfillment, boredom and routine, and even the occasional train wreck ... But when you have picked a dream that is bigger than you personally, that truly reflects the ideals that you cherish, and that can positively affect others, then you will always have another reason for carrying on. — Pamela Melroy

Too often, the person who wrecks our work is us. — Seth Godin

Shut up ... let me tell you, LET ME. Every time I look at your face or even remember it, it wrecks me. And the way you are with me and you're just fun and you shit all over me and you make fun of me and you're real. I don't have enough time in any day to think about you enough ... I don't even think about women anymore. I think about you. — Louis C.K.

If it doesn't work, at least it will be an interesting train wreck. — Craig Ferguson

It is because God loves the world he has made, and especially his human creatures, that he hates everything that spoils, wrecks, or defaces it. — N. T. Wright

Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people. — Andrew Mellon

I can't afford to die. It would wreck my image. — Jack LaLanne

Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd. — John Milton

[Ted] Cruz is going down. He looks like a nervous wreck. — Donald Trump

Weak leadership can wreck the soundest strategy — Sun Tzu

We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That's what connects us
that we're all broken, all beautifully imperfect. — Emilio Estevez

Ex-girlfriends are like car wrecks. You shouldn't want to know the details, but you do. — Allison Van Diepen

There are three types of people who choose a career in HR: sadistic assholes who were probably all tattletales in school, empathetic (and soon-to-be-disillusioned) idealists who think they can make a difference in the lives of others, and those of us who stick around because it gives you the best view of all the most entertaining train wrecks happening in the rest of the company. — Jenny Lawson

You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Pass the pub that wrecks your body And the church, all they want is your money — Steven Morrissey

Wrecks are going to happen in this business, that's just a risk of the sport. If you can't keep from worrying about it, then you're in the wrong line of work. — Coo Coo Marlin

We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most. — Plato

I love movies. And I dig a great love story: the kind that wrecks me, then builds me back up and leaves me inspired. I write what I want to see. — Gina Prince-Bythewood

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world. — William Allen White

If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage. — Bill McKibben

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding. — Brian Doyle

I guess I get a little sentimental, but I'm so used to moving on and making myself stronger where that's concerned, otherwise I would just be a wreck! — Jeremy London

I'm attracted to creative people and train wrecks, and there's no shortage of that in Los Angeles. — Pete Wentz

It's amazing what storms your face can hide, what terrible wrecks can writhe and heave beneath, without one ripple on the surface. — Jenny Valentine

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. — Nathanael West

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck. — Joseph Brodsky

In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. — Paul Monette

P.S. Please don't call me Isabella. That name belongs to a really pretty girl who never wrecks her clothes and who never gets dirt under her fingernails. That's definitely not me. My name is Izzy. — Jenny Lundquist

My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression. She was acculturated! Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say "Jack Robinson." As Trout wrote in his "An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto": "Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous." He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: "If I hadn't learned how to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times." *** — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all. — G.K. Chesterton

God wisheth none should wreck on a strange shelf: To him man's dearer than to himself. — Ben Jonson

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? - Because one did survive the wreck. — Herman Melville

We're always going to be a society that's going to slow down and look at the wreck on the side if the road if there is one. We're always going to do that because it's still fascinating and it's human nature. — George Clooney

If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance, ... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story. — Henry David Thoreau

I'm not great about putting on make-up, I look like a wreck half the time. — Gwyneth Paltrow

I get it," said Link. "Even if it wrecks everything, even if you know you're gonna get busted, sometimes you gotta do it anyway."
"Something like that. — Kami Garcia

It rolls in grandeur lone
The stream of Time;
And on its shores lie strown
The wrecks of every clime. — Harvey Rice

I doubt it's a strictly factual account, but these attitudes are deeply imbedded.
Which means that our only hope of changing them, of ending the wrecks, lies not in stopping or even changing the Internet -- even with the best blocking functions, report-abuse functions, real-name transparency protocols, and twenty-four-hour moderation in the world, hate (to quite Jurassic Park) finds a way -- but in changing ourselves, and our definitions of womanhood. We have to stop believing that when a woman does something we don't like, we are qualified and entitled to punish her, violate her, or ruin her life. We have to change our ideas of what a "good" woman, or a "likable" woman, or simply a "woman who can leave her house without fearing for her life because she is a woman," can be. — Sady Doyle

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself ... — Philip Larkin

All you did was wreck my bed and in the morning kick me in the head. — Rod Stewart

I don't pay attention. I don't read stuff or message boards because you definitely get affected. You can read a hundred great comments, amazing comments, and have one bad one and that is all you can focus on and it wrecks your day. It says something about negativity and how it draws us somehow. — Joan Jett

Colleges are becoming more conscious of their roles - too frequently neglected - in social mobility. They're recognizing how many admissions measures favor students from affluent families.

They're realizing that many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions. — New York Times

I like to work fast. I despise not having the right tool or, worse, knowing I have it but not being able to find it. It's a pointless delay that wrecks my pace - and mood. — Adam Savage

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague, — Margaret Atwood

The Russian revolution is one of history's car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable. — Kathryn Harrison

That's the funny thing about music. Part of the magic, I quess. Sometimes it replenishes me, like I'm feeding off its energy and it fills me. And other times, it pulls at my pain, weaves its way through the strands of my soul and wrecks it. — Caisey Quinn

Lightning will wreck its displeasures not only upon pillars, trees, and sheep, but upon altars and temples, and let the sacrilegious go free. — Seneca The Younger

Did you really think I'd ceased to care? Kitten, I care so much it wrecks me. — Jeaniene Frost

Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually marked by an ill placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We are warned by the Word both of our duty, our danger, and our remedy. On the sea of life there would be many more wrecks if it were not for the divine storm-signals which give to the watchful a timely warning. The Bible should be our Mentor, our Monitor, our Memento Mori, our Remembrancer, and the Keeper of our Conscience. — Charles Spurgeon

The weathercocks on spires and housetops were mysterious with hints of stormy wind, and pointed, like so many ghostly fingers, out to dangerous seas, where fragments of great wrecks were drifting, perhaps, and helpless men were rocked upon them into a sleep as deep as the unfathomable waters. — Charles Dickens

Christian, beware how thou thinkest lightly of sin. Take heed lest thou fall by little and little. Sin, a little thing? Is it not a poison? Who knows its deadliness? Sin, a little thing? Do not the little foxes spoil the grapes? Doth not the tiny coral insect build a rock which wrecks a navy? Do not little strokes fell lofty oaks? Will not continual droppings wear away stones? Sin, a little thing? It girded the Redeemer's head with thorns, and pierced His heart! It made Him suffer anguish, bitterness, and woe. Could you weigh the least sin in the scales of eternity, you would fly from it as from a serpent, and abhor the least appearance of evil. Look upon all sin as that which crucified the Saviour, and you will see it to be exceeding sinful. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I just always wanted to sit in a casting session and see all of the train wrecks that come in. — Holland Roden

I just see a huge train wreck coming down. You and I have discussed this many times, and I don't see any results yet. — Max Baucus

Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. Tod — Nathanael West

In the cross of Christ I glory,Towering o'er the wrecks of time;All the light of sacred storyGathers round its head sublime. — John Bowring

Anti-social behaviour still blights lives, wrecks communities and provides a pathway to criminality. — Theresa May

Paracelsus At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages' way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance Ages ago; and in that act a prayer For one more chance went up so earnest, so Instinct with better light let in by death, That life was blotted out - not so completely But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories, as now, when once more seems The goal in sight again. — Robert Browning

All of my close friends are emotional train wrecks. This is what makes our lives interesting - constantly doubting ourselves, worrying, wondering if we've made a mistake. Could we have done better? Are we good people? Are we bad people? — Patrick DeWitt

Swept into the giddy vortex which keeps so many young people revolving aimlessly, till they go down or are cast upon the shore, wrecks of what they might have been — Louisa May Alcott

You may often have to watch Jesus Christ wreck a life before He saves it. — Oswald Chambers

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces - each seven in number - so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended - not an abolished - expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, "THOU DIDST IT!" Seven — Charles Dickens

Screw the dialogue, let's wreck some cars. — Hal Needham

'The Notebook' wrecks me! I cry like a 6-year-old girl at the end. — Matt Barr

It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren't surprising at all but follow a formula, like the dead body that's certain to lurch out of a wreck being explored by deep-sea divers in just about every book that involves wrecks and divers. — Will Schwalbe

A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea. — Dylan Thomas

I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. — Ray Bradbury

People have only two or three adjectives to describe people in the public eye. And that's okay. As long as those adjectives aren't train wreck, mess, terrible. — Taylor Swift

Train wreck, extremely fast train, but usually ends up derailed somehow, — Clint Bowyer

The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [ ... ] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War. — John Coleman

Between being able to and actually doing something lies an ocean, and on its bottom rests all too often the wreck of willpower. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself. — Samuel Beckett

It is curious how vanity helps the successful man and wrecks the failure. — Oscar Wilde

People always slow down for a train wreck. It's like junk food. If you don't feel good about yourself, you want to read crap about other people, like gossip in high school. You don't understand why it's there, but somehow it makes a lot of people feel better. — Angelina Jolie

If you're not a wreck in this business, you're not around. — Joan Rivers

The past is but an untraceable footfall
It appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,
In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.
It's often dark and ruthless.
It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.
By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectations
And our shattered dreams
It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.
It wrecks our present and ruins our future
And thus should be left where it is meant to be
It should be left behind ... — Chirag Tulsiani

I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop But if baby I'm the bottom, you're the top. — Cole Porter

High buildings fall, black oceans rise, and coins sink in height
Where weapons smash in every grace, with every black and white
The east drops, the west too, children die and so do old
With every sin, and every crime, people drop by their gold

The ground wrecks to chunks where people tend to fall
And gardens turn dumps but the tiny bird's soul
Fire, Wind, Water and Sun, all kill a birth
It just goes on to be the Last day on earth — Yehya El Kouzi

You are nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom. The shore is safer, but I love to buffet the sea - I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger! — Emily Dickinson

Money-making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down. Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you. — Ama Ata Aidoo

Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors' graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch's Fingers, four long talons of sand that lay in the mouth of the river. Rumour had it that, on stormy nights a century ago, they used to reach out, gouge holes in passing ships, and drag them down. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried in that glistening silt. The city's black heart had beaten strongly even then. There was one funeral director, supposedly, who used to put lamps out on the Fingers and lure ships to their doom. — Rupert Thomson

The man who boldly transgresses, amassing a great heap unjustly
by force, in time, he will strike his sail, when trouble seizes him as the yardarm is splintered. He calls on those who hear nothing and he struggles in the midst of the whirling waters. The god laughs at the hot-headed man, seeing him, who boasted that this would never happen, exhausted by distress without remedy and unable to surmount the cresting wave. He wrecks the happiness of his earlier life on the reef of Justice, and he perishes unwept, unseen. — Aeschylus

The Wreck of the Hesperus But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I'm a total wreck. Afraid to let anyone near. Afraid they'll see the real me. — Ellen Hopkins

But the earth turns, and old ways are reexamined. The insurance companies say there are so many deer, so many wrecks. They have algorithms on their side. Kill more deer. Let all the predators live. — Matthew Neill Null

As a boy, it occurred to me, all people over 40 had seemed to me just worn-out old wrecks, so old that there was hardly any difference between them. A man of 45 had seemed to me older than this old dodderer of 65 seemed now. I was 45 myself. It frightened me. — George Orwell

For too long, we've called unbelievers to "invite Jesus into your life." Jesus doesn't want to be in your life. Your life is a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life. And his life isn't boring or purposeless or static. It's wild and exhilarating and unpredictable. — Russell D. Moore

Nor deem the irrevocable Past
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Bad bread wrecks my outlook on life. — Jeffrey Steingarten

The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood. — Clive James

We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it. — George Monbiot