"Backwash" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tremendous struggling I managed to get close up to the shore, but found it utterly impossible to climb up and land. Every time I essayed to plant my legs on the beach, the irresistible backwash swept me down, rolling me head over heels, and in my exhausted condition this filled me with despair. On one occasion this backwash sent me spinning into deep water again, and I am sure I should have been drowned had not my brave dog come to my rescue and seized me by my hair—which, I should ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... stagnant place there is much ugliness. Much ugliness is churned up in the wake of mighty, moving forces. We are witnessing a phase in the evolution of humanity, a phase called War—and the slow, onward progress stirs up the slime in the shallows, and this is the Backwash of War. It is very ugly. There are many little lives foaming up in the backwash. They are loosened by the sweeping current, and float to the surface, detached from their environment, and one glimpses them, weak, hideous, repellent. After the war, they ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... them, followed by icy shock. She yanked the cab door shut and shouted something to the driver. The cab took off with a rush that left Feldman in a backwash of slush ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... mark and beyond, so with the first tide, wind-driven, the sea shall fill your channel, pour into your pit, brimming it full and your banks being higher than your boat she shall swim and be drawn seaward on the backwash. So, here's the way on't. And so must you sweat and dig and labour, and I joy to watch—Ah, yes, for you shall sweat, dig and labour in vain, except you swear me I shall sail with you." So saying, she drops me a mocking courtsey and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... still—and still not without its qualities. Here's one at least who finds it the very salve for weariness. Playing it, I often feel in the trance of rapture. I wish to God I could live my life upon the flute, for there I'm on the best and cleanest terms with myself, and no backwash of penitence. Eh! listen ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the river, churning the water into a yellowish, foaming mass; her captain bellowed and barked, her crew yelped, her passengers shouted; the flat boats and perogues moored along the bank, aroused from their lassitude, began to romp gaily in the swirl of her crazy backwash; ropes whined and rasped and groaned, the deck rattled hollowly with the tread of heavy feet and the shifting of boxes and barrels and crates; the gangplank came down with a crash,—and so the mighty hundred and fifty ton leviathan of the Wabash came ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... the first battalions of youth, so gay in their approach to war, so confident of victory, so careless of the dangers (which they did not know), came back maimed and mangled and blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat, which presently became a spate through Belgium and the north of France, swamping over many cities and thousands of villages and many fields. Those young writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to Fleet Street with a queer ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Huxley was born ten years after Waterloo, while the country was still in the backwash of the long-drawn Napoleonic wars. It was a time of material reconstruction and expansion, while social reconstruction lagged sadly and angrily behind. The year of his birth saw the first railway opened in England; it was seven years before electoral ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... drifted in the direction of a rocky point on which a heavy surf was breaking. Here I thought once again to swim ashore. But suddenly we struck a rock. A large piece broke off the already small pan, and what was left swung round in the backwash, and started ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell |
