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wrest
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  • Each watched and waited for an opportunity to wrest control from her, keeping a none-too-friendly eye on the other families in case they happened to make a move first.   (source)
    wrest = take with force
  • He tried to wrest the key from Catherine's grasp, and for safety she flung it into the hottest part of the fire; whereupon Mr. Edgar was taken with a nervous trembling, and his countenance grew deadly pale.   (source)
  • Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers.†   (source)
  • They carried Malcolm back to the Jeep, and wrested him into the back seat.†   (source)
  • Her arms still ached from wresting the heavy ears from the stalks, row after row, hour after hour.†   (source)
  • She can't help but wonder who will console her the day her own mother dies, if that news will also come to her in this way, in the middle of the night, wresting her from dreams.†   (source)
  • Then I think of the spile and wrest it from the tree trunk.†   (source)
  • He talks about American history, If the American farmer, with flintlock and musket, could wrest from the English a continent, surely we, warriors ever, can recover our island.†   (source)
  • The world was about to flip, the meek were about to inherit the earth or, more precisely, wrest it from the strong, and we, the meekest and weakest, would be heirs to the vast estate of all that had been denied us.†   (source)
  • The U.S. had mostly wrested control of the city from the bad guys, and it was now just a matter of time before resistance collapsed.†   (source)
  • "That one, brother, he bite," she said, pointing her knuckly hand at a small tree he was wresting from his garden plot.†   (source)
  • He wrested the sonic away just as the second Ouster swung into the room, agile as an Old Earth chimp.†   (source)
  • We recognize in them a personal calamity that is particular to its time but that has the universality of great suffering and despair and courage, of a "victim" seeking to wrest control over his own life away from the condition that has controlled him.†   (source)
  • I see Chava hobbleaway, two confused teenagers at his side, and as he vanishes into a flicker of neon, I hear the final tempo of the crazy life leave my body, the last song before the dying, lapsing forever out of mind as Chava disappears, enveloped in flames breaking through the asphalt, wrested into the black heart of night.†   (source)
  • A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods.†   (source)
  • Elinor had her work cut out getting herself up the hillside, which was crisscrossed with low walls that had been built in a laborious attempt to wrest narrow fields and orchards from the poor soil, somewhere to grow a few olive trees and grapevines, anything that would bear fruit here.†   (source)
  • But if the stakes were raised, and the conductor's baton wrested from Chacko's hands, everybody (except Chacko) knew that the factory, already steeped in debt, would be in trouble.†   (source)
  • More than two years we've been here, she thought, and twice that number at least to go before we can even hope to think of trying to wrest Arrakis from the Harkonnen governor, the Mudir Nahya, the Beast Rabban.†   (source)
  • He had only to wrest from him what this was and then say no thank you.†   (source)
  • If she could wrest him away from Nasuada, he knew she would.†   (source)
  • It almost felt like something was pushing against his will, wresting the sea from his control.†   (source)
  • If any female now playing is to wrest the title of world chess champion from men, it is likely to be her.†   (source)
  • It became the territorial jewel that the Jammu-Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) fighters they branded terrorists could not be allowed to wrest from India's crown.†   (source)
  • Just eight months before, Marines had wrested Saipan away from the Japanese.†   (source)
  • He wrested loose from Tripodi's grasp and came at me.†   (source)
  • I might have come to understand that he had somehow managed to wrest a conscious life from the same forces that governed these monsters.†   (source)
  • The only time Jaime lost his patience was one morning when he awoke to find the city plastered with angry posters that portrayed a full-bellied, lonely woman vainly attempting to wrest her son from the arms of a Communist soldier who was dragging him off to Moscow.†   (source)
  • Help who?' called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening, paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right…†   (source)
  • There came a point every day when Snow Flower wrested herself away from the fire to wander the snowy mountains.†   (source)
  • Ari broke through another bar of the cage, and his unnaturally strong arms began to wrest the surrounding bars apart.†   (source)
  • The former involves covering as much material as possible, without attempting to wrest from it all its implications and intricacies; the latter involves confining oneself to one single area until it is exhaustively covered, and then going on to new material.†   (source)
  • The extraordinary ingenuity and industry of the Dutch in wresting land from the sea were legendary.†   (source)
  • You know that many backs broke to wrest that soil from clutching root and stubborn stump; you know that hands bled, dragging forth the rocks that sit arrayed now as the fencesthat mark out worked land from wilderness.†   (source)
  • Gregor Clegane had wrested the immense, gloomy castle away from the Bloody Mummers before Cersei recalled him to King's Landing.†   (source)
  • I'd always had to work so hard to keep my mother's interest, wresting it away from her work, her colleagues, her students, my brother.†   (source)
  • She wanted to wrest from him an acknowledgment of his moral depravity-but only his own moral rectitude could attach significance to such a verdict.†   (source)
  • They exercised their rights to wrest themselves from false imprisonment and servitude.†   (source)
  • Yes, with the aid of time, man becomes capable of wresting the immortal from the mortal.†   (source)
  • Knowing that they would have to wrest themselves from sleep in a few hours' time, they found it difficult to settle, and they took a little walk.†   (source)
  • It was attuned to him, and like so many other magical artifacts from the dawn of the world, Crenshinibon could not be wrested from its possessor by sheer force.†   (source)
  • Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.†   (source)
  • I heard her groan, that sound again wrested from her nethermost depths.†   (source)
  • Then taking the key that he had wrested from the slain man he closed the door and locked it.†   (source)
  • It did not matter to me what I looked at; from any observation I would conclude that a secret oflife had been revealed to me—for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment.†   (source)
  • The brave bands of Texans did indeed wrest their liberty from Mexico, and "freedom," "liberty," are holy words.†   (source)
  • I soon stopped trying to wrest her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along with her on those fantastic swoops into the past.†   (source)
  • Then I shall wrest it from him and turn it against him.†   (source)
  • But I'd wrest my hand free and take a swing.†   (source)
  • I think that already he foresaw his livelihood being wrested from him, for he salted and tanned his own skins, making them into chaplis for those in the village who wore them.†   (source)
  • She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them.†   (source)
  • They had been given to me by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them.   (source)
    wrest = obtain with difficult effort
  • He managed to cling to the oars, and with effort wrested them back to their places.   (source)
    wrested = obtained with difficult effort
  • Harry heard a scuffle over by the door and knew that Hermione had also just had her wand wrested from her.   (source)
    wrested = taken by force
  • I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.   (source)
    wrested = taken with difficult effort
  • I snarl at him, trying to wrest my arm from his grasp.†   (source)
  • While every other district has now wrested control from the Capitol, 2 remains in its pocket.†   (source)
  • She saw this wedding as a chance to wrest the throne from her brother.†   (source)
  • I will settle them on the Gift, once I have wrested it away from your new Lord Commander.†   (source)
  • He ate one-handed, the other clutching a sharpened stick lest anyone try to wrest away his prize.†   (source)
  • As he was wresting it free, a blaze of white appeared at the edge of his vision.†   (source)
  • Let us leave this place, for no good can be wrested from him in this state.†   (source)
  • She wrested the spear from him and used the butt to knock him off his feet.†   (source)
  • And then I chopped again, bundles of roots wrested out of the frosty ground.†   (source)
  • For wrongfully he has made war upon Gondor and wrested its lands.†   (source)
  • As Ron ran to pull Hermione out of the wreckage, Harry took the chance: He leapt over an armchair and wrested the three wands from Draco's grip, pointed all of them at Greyback, and yelled, "Stupefy!†   (source)
  • During the Dark Days, the rebels in 13 wrested control from the government forces, trained their nuclear missiles on the Capitol, and then struck a bargain: They would play dead in exchange for being left alone.†   (source)
  • No, I think it would be foolish to attempt to wrest the truth from Professor Slughorn by force, and might do much more harm than good; I do not wish him to leave Hogwarts.†   (source)
  • He wrested the cork from the labelless bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape that he had taken from the Metropol's cellar back in 1924.†   (source)
  • Thanks to those remarkable men, plus others uncounted who died on the way, Angola has wrested itself free of Portugal and still owns its diamonds and oil wells.†   (source)
  • The only option left was to strive their utmost and hope that, somehow, it would be enough to wrest victory from the mistakes of his incompetence.†   (source)
  • Huple was a good pilot, Yossarian knew, but he was only a kid, and Dobbs had no confidence in him, either, and wrested the controls away without warning after they had dropped their bombs, going berserk in mid-air and tipping the plane over into that heart-stopping, ear-splitting, indescribably petrifying fatal dive that tore Yossarian's earphones free from their connection and hung him helplessly to the roof of the nose by the top of his head.†   (source)
  • "I placed the crown upon his head," said the priest, seaweed dripping in his hair, "and gladly will I wrest it off again and crown you in his stead.†   (source)
  • Through the summer of 1945, Iwo Jima continued to serve the purpose for which it had been wrested from the Japanese: to provide air cover and an emergency landing strip for the B-29 bombers flying from their base in Tinian to their targets in Japan.†   (source)
  • Trying to wrest the heights of this massif from the Austri-ans, it had suffered heavy casualties, and needed men to work machine guns, do guard duty, haul wood, and take care of isolated outposts.†   (source)
  • Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good.†   (source)
  • If that knowledge requires you to use anger, then you use anger, but you cannot wrest forth knowledge by losing your temper.†   (source)
  • This court rules that the blacks on board the Amistad, save for the slave boy Antonio, were acting as free-born men, who were attempting to wrest their liberty from false imprisonment.†   (source)
  • Then magicians from all of the different clans joined their thoughts, invaded the prisoners' minds, and wrested from them the information the clanmeet desired.†   (source)
  • Petyr said that marked one of the places the Andals had landed, when they came across the sea to wrest the Vale from the First Men.†   (source)
  • With every eye on the king, somehow the man on the floor wrested a spear away from one of the gold cloaks, and used it to push himself back to his feet.†   (source)
  • In the second part, however, I rule that I will not order extradition to Cuba of the negroes participating in the mutiny, since, as stated, these men were trying to wrest themselves from illegal bondage and thus in the eyes of this court, acting in self-defense.†   (source)
  • Dismayed, Eragon dropped the broken sword and gripped the rim of the dwarf's buckler, wresting with him back and forth and struggling to keep the shield between him and the dagger graced with a halo of translucent colors.†   (source)
  • Gilpin went on to question much of the "supposed evidence" brought forth by the defense that cast aspersions on whether the blacks were slaves or not and hence acting as men attempting to wrest themselves from unlawful imprisonment.†   (source)
  • It did not matter to me what I looked at; from any observation I would conclude that a secret of life had been nearly revealed to me— for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment.†   (source)
  • He winked to put a period to it and continued, "Much of my power is in the form of knowledge, which even the Lords of Karma could not have wrested from me.†   (source)
  • Just as she reached the landing she heard Brahms' Alto Rhapsody on the phonograph, Marian Anderson's flowering dark exultancy, triumph wrested from eons of despair.†   (source)
  • I told him of her earlier visit and the grain she had extorted from me also; and it seemed to me that a new peace came to us then, freed at last from the necessity for lies and concealment and deceit, with the fear of betrayal lifted from us, and with the power we ourselves had given her wrested finally from Kunthi.†   (source)
  • The swan-feather sword he wrested from this monster can be seen in the Wentung County Armory in Shantung today.†   (source)
  • In the ensuing struggle at the conclusion of the services, the woman, who was a member of the choir, is believed to have received fatal ice-pick injuries to a vital organ, then to have wrested the weapon from her assailant and paid him back in kind.†   (source)
  • Eva's two possessions, which she refused to park in the luggage rack but clutched fiercely as if any moment they might be wrested from her hands: the flute in its leather case and her mis—the one-eared, one-eyed teddy bear she had kept since the cradle.†   (source)
  • I would have cut it up, and we would be mopping blood this morning, but-a Sitting Ghost mutation-it had an extra arm that wrested my hand away from the knife.†   (source)
  • This was probably the only thing that could have roused the dying embers of Frodo's heart and will: an attack, an attempt to wrest his treasure from him by force.†   (source)
  • Ruthie sprang at her, slapped her, pushed her, and wrested the mallet from her hands.†   (source)
  • One of the policemen held out an unrolled parcel which they had wrested from their captive.†   (source)
  • Grafted to terror, the mind, wrested away, tore terror with it.†   (source)
  • He was trying to wrest something from them.†   (source)
  • She was going to rush into life and wrest from it what she could.†   (source)
  • Uncle Nathan wrested his arm away, shook a desperate, baffled finger at his wife.†   (source)
  • But these were hard things to do, because the people must learn that it is harmful for each man to wrest a living from his own little piece of ground.†   (source)
  • Jason sailed through the Clashing Rocks into a sea of marvels, circumvented the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece, and returned with the fleece and the power to wrest his rightful throne from a usurper.†   (source)
  • THE HEGEMONY WRESTED from the enemy, the freedom won from the malice of the monster, the life energy released from the toils of the tyrant Holdfast—is symbolized as a woman.†   (source)
  • Her brothers would laugh and try to wrest the page from each other with their strong hard fingers.†   (source)
  • 'It is hard to tell you what it was precisely she wanted to wrest from me.†   (source)
  • I will say thou didst break in and wrest the prisoner from my hands by force.†   (source)
  • In the former case their power escapes from them; it is wrested from their grasp in the latter.†   (source)
  • But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.†   (source)
  • 'I have taken leave of you,' said I, wresting my hand away.†   (source)
  • [Trying to wrest the revolver from him] Give it to me; give it to me, I tell you!†   (source)
  • When I came here today, I thought that nothing could have wrested this confession from me.†   (source)
  • What! hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands?†   (source)
  • And how strange it was that, instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend!†   (source)
  • A famous law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment of the Courts, and a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations.†   (source)
  • And this malady, which was Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case was past operation.†   (source)
  • These, in their turn, cursed back at the blind miscreant, threatened him in horrid terms, and tried in vain to catch the stick and wrest it from his grasp.†   (source)
  • He was like the Emperor of China, who sat glorying in himself, unaware that his fairest provinces were being wrested from him.†   (source)
  • He drew clumsily and fired absurdly, and in another moment he was struck in the mouth and the revolver wrested from his grip.†   (source)
  • Grandfather Settembrini had struggled for political rights—but his own grandfather, or at least his ancestors, had originally possessed all those rights, which over the course of four centuries the rabble had wrested from them by force and slogans.†   (source)
  • —the fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence?†   (source)
  • She seemed a thorough master of her mood-thoroughly confident and determined to wrest all control from him.†   (source)
  • There had always been people who had willingly entered into illness and madness in order to win knowledge for mankind— and knowledge, having been wrested from madness, became health and, once obtained by heroic sacrifice, its possession and use were no longer conditioned by illness and madness.†   (source)
  • But your emphasis on that verb leaves me cold, inasmuch as the heroic age that 'wrested' your ideals came to an end long ago—those ideals are dead, or at best lie twitching in their death throes, and those whom they had hoped to finish off have got their foot in the door again.†   (source)
  • But now it was all wrested from him.†   (source)
  • The achievements that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment wrested from the past—and may I emphasize, my dear sir, the struggles contained in that verb—were individual human personality, human rights, and human freedom.†   (source)
  • It is only in chance cases, where a fortune or a state of success is wrested from them, that the lack of ability to do as they did formerly becomes apparent.†   (source)
  • He graduated with honors and, true to his resolve, exchanged the life of a boarding-school pupil for that of a novice in nearby Tisis—a life of service and humility, of silent subordination and religious training, from which he wrested intellectual pleasures congruent with his earlier wild fantasies.†   (source)
  • I wished to bury it during my whole life in my own bosom, but your brother Maximilian wrested it from me by a violence he repents of now, I am sure.†   (source)
  • How the evidence that had been warped and wrested from the young lady, whose anguish in giving it they had witnessed, came to nothing, involving the mere little innocent gallantries and politenesses likely to pass between any young gentleman and young lady so thrown together;—with the exception of that reference to George Washington, which was altogether too extravagant and impossible to be regarded in any other light than as a monstrous joke.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER XXXII And I beseech you, Wrest once the law, to your authority: To do a great right, do a little wrong.†   (source)
  • " 'Ah, ah!' cried he, seizing my arm, and wresting from me the weapon that had so badly served me, 'you want to take my life, do you, my pretty Puritan?†   (source)
  • If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.†   (source)
  • St. Clare and one or two others made an effort to separate them, and St. Clare received a fatal stab in the side with a bowie-knife, which he was attempting to wrest from one of them.†   (source)
  • It is true that Marmaduke, by thus purchasing estates that had been wrested by violence from others, rendered himself obnoxious to the censures of that Sect which, at the same time that it discards its children from a full participation in the family union, seems ever unwilling to abandon them entirely to the world.†   (source)
  • As for me, I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation.†   (source)
  • The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.†   (source)
  • The Jew inflicted a smart blow on Oliver's shoulders with the club; and was raising it for a second, when the girl, rushing forward, wrested it from his hand.†   (source)
  • If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here or leave your cousin Ada here.†   (source)
  • My bosom, of its thirst for knowledge sated, Shall not, henceforth, from any pang be wrested, And all of life for all mankind created Shall be within mine inmost being tested: The highest, lowest forms my soul shall borrow, Shall heap upon itself their bliss and sorrow, And thus, my own sole self to all their selves expanded, I too, at last, shall with them all be stranded!†   (source)
  • It must be admitted, rather nakedly, that Christopher Newman's sole aim in life had been to make money; what he had been placed in the world for was, to his own perception, simply to wrest a fortune, the bigger the better, from defiant opportunity.†   (source)
  • Solid matter had wrested from liquid matter some 37,657,000 square miles, hence 12,916,000,000 hectares.†   (source)
  • I will die regretting the victory and glory wrested from me; thou wilt live to die a little later, mourning the pious duties undone because of this folly.†   (source)
  • Smarting with the agony of the blow, and concentrating into that one moment all his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.†   (source)
  • She made this sacrifice as a matter of religious etiquette; as a thing necessary just now, but by no means to be wrested into a precedent; no, a week or two would limber up her piety, then she would be rational again, and the next two dollars that got left out in the cold would find a comforter—and she could name the comforter.†   (source)
  • The arm of the latter slowly gave way before the increasing force of the scout, who, suddenly wresting his armed hand from the grasp of the foe, drove the sharp weapon through his naked bosom to the heart.†   (source)
  • Nor does it only happen, in such a case, that they allow their freedom to be wrested from them; they frequently themselves surrender it.†   (source)
  • It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.†   (source)
  • The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe the property of the soil had been wrested.†   (source)
  • The Minstrel seemed of no vulgar rank; for, besides the splendour of his gaily braidered doublet, he wore around his neck a silver chain, by which hung the "wrest", or key, with which he tuned his harp.†   (source)
  • Nicholas shrugged his shoulders; but sheer destitution was before him; and if he could summon fortitude to undergo the extremes of want and hardship, for what had he rescued his helpless charge if it were only to bear as hard a fate as that from which he had wrested him?†   (source)
  • The Huron chief, after casting the weapons he had wrested from his companions over the rock, drew his knife, and turned to his captive, with a look in which conflicting passions fiercely contended.†   (source)
  • The papyrus from which it was taken by the priests of Philae was wrested from the hand of the heroine herself.†   (source)
  • At the commencement of a great democratic revolution, when hostilities have but just broken out between the different classes of society, the people endeavors to centralize the public administration in the hands of the government, in order to wrest the management of local affairs from the aristocracy.†   (source)
  • On this very site, beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the pine-trees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him; and it was only from a dead man's stiffened fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrested away the title-deeds.†   (source)
  • Mahtoree had left many a daring brave behind him in his band, and the orator, who in the debates of that day had manifested such pacific thoughts, now exhibited the most generous self-devotion, in order to wrest the memorial of a man he had never loved, from the hands of the avowed enemies of his people.†   (source)
  • But here are your bonds; pay me differently;" and he held the bonds towards Danglars, who seized them like a vulture extending its claws to withhold the food that is being wrested from its grasp.†   (source)
  • In essence, the year before, the royal houses of Holland, Austria, and England had signed a treaty of alliance at The Hague, aiming to wrest the Spanish crown from King Philip V and to place it on the head of an archduke whom they prematurely dubbed King Charles III.†   (source)
  • Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history a liar.†   (source)
  • So, in order that he might begin to enjoy himself at once, and lose no time, Mr Browdie gave his wife a hearty kiss, and succeeded in wresting another from Miss Squeers, after a maidenly resistance of scratching and struggling on the part of that young lady, which was not quite over when they reached the Saracen's Head.†   (source)
  • He was the direct, sole heir to these treasures wrested from the Incas and those peoples conquered by Hernando Cortez!†   (source)
  • These last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea of any man's asserting a right—on the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead and forgotten—to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil.†   (source)
  • The father foresees the limits of his authority long beforehand, and when the time arrives he surrenders it without a struggle: the son looks forward to the exact period at which he will be his own master; and he enters upon his freedom without precipitation and without effort, as a possession which is his own and which no one seeks to wrest from him.†   (source)
  • "Men of the Tiber," Messala continued, wresting a box with the dice in it from a hand near-by, "who is he most favored of the gods?†   (source)
  • Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command.†   (source)
  • My object is to remark, that all these various rights, which have been successively wrested, in our time, from classes, corporations, and individuals, have not served to raise new secondary powers on a more democratic basis, but have uniformly been concentrated in the hands of the sovereign.†   (source)
  • How could I relinquish this ocean—"my own Atlantic," as I liked to call it—without observing its lower strata, without wresting from it the kinds of secrets that had been revealed to me by the seas of the East Indies and the Pacific!†   (source)
  • The spear was wrested from the ground, and over the wound it had riven in the sod the base of the first pillar of the tent was planted, marking the centre of the front door.†   (source)
  • A people is therefore never so disposed to increase the functions of central government as at the close of a long and bloody revolution, which, after having wrested property from the hands of its former possessors, has shaken all belief, and filled the nation with fierce hatreds, conflicting interests, and contending factions.†   (source)
  • When you see the Americans freely and constantly forming associations for the purpose of promoting some political principle, of raising one man to the head of affairs, or of wresting power from another, you have some difficulty in understanding that men so independent do not constantly fall into the abuse of freedom.†   (source)
  • Thetis left her son still burning for the softly belted girl whom they had wrested from him.†   (source)
  • He dazed the Argives, wresting glory away from them.†   (source)
  • He who would attack that state from the outside must have the utmost caution; as long as the prince resides there it can only be wrested from him with the greatest difficulty.†   (source)
  • When Sir Tristram saw him make such countenance he looked upon both his hands that were fast bounden unto two knights, and suddenly he pulled them both to him, and unwrast his hands, and then he leapt unto his cousin, Sir Andred, and wrested his sword out of his hands; then he smote Sir Andred that he fell to the earth, and so Sir Tristram fought till that he had killed ten knights.†   (source)
  • Hektor three times had the feet within his grasp and strove to wrest Patroklos backward, shouting to all the Trojans—but three times the pair named Aias in their valor shook him off.†   (source)
  • Zeus and Fate and a nightmare Fury are, for putting savage Folly in my mind in the assembly that day, when I wrested Akhilleus' prize of war from him.†   (source)
  • But Zeus perceived it, and he guarded Hektor— wrested that boon from Telamonian Teukros, who as he pulled the smooth bow snapped the string.†   (source)
  • In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason.   (source)
    wrest = take (with effort)
  • …could field in the wide world up there ….
    Oh to arrive at father's house—the man I was,
    for one brief day—I'd make my fury and my hands,

    invincible hands, a thing of terror to all those men
    who abuse the king with force and wrest away his honor!'
    So he grieved but I tried to lend him heart:
    'About noble Peleus I can tell you nothing,
    but about your own dear son, Neoptolemus,
    I can report the whole story, as you wish.
    I myself, in my trim ship, I brought him
    out…†   (source)
  • —
    yes, and the song men sing of her will ring with loathing.
    She brands with a foul name the breed of womankind,
    even the honest ones to come!"
    So they traded stories,
    the two ghosts standing there in the House of Death,
    far in the hidden depths below the earth.
    Odysseus and his men had stridden down from town
    and quickly reached Laertes' large, well-tended farm
    that the old king himself had wrested from the wilds,
    years ago, laboring long and hard.†   (source)
  • Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?†   (source)
  • Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them.†   (source)
  • And you who wrest old images from the burial earth?†   (source)
  • 23:6 Thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause.†   (source)
  • 56:5 Every day they wrest my words: all their thoughts are against me for evil.†   (source)
  • I like them all, and do allow them well, And swear here, by the honour of my blood, My father's purposes have been mistook, And some about him have too lavishly Wrested his meaning and authority.†   (source)
  • A struggle then ensued, in which the former wrested the pistol from the hand of his antagonist, and both came from their horses on the ground together, the highwayman upon his back, and the victorious Jones upon him.†   (source)
  • When Sir Tristram saw him make such countenance he looked upon both his hands that were fast bounden unto two knights, and suddenly he pulled them both to him, and unwrast his hands, and then he leapt unto his cousin, Sir Andred, and wrested his sword out of his hands; then he smote Sir Andred that he fell to the earth, and so Sir Tristram fought till that he had killed ten knights.†   (source)
  • And, I beseech you, Wrest once the law to your authority; To do a great right do a little wrong, And curb this cruel devil of his will.†   (source)
  • And because the same things may enter into account for divers accidents; their names are (to shew that diversity) diversly wrested, and diversified.†   (source)
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