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shambles
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  • The retreat is a bloody shambles.†   (source)
  • Can a man not come back for an axe helve without finding his house a shambles?†   (source)
  • The kitchen was a shambles.†   (source)
  • Er …. no. It would be fair to describe it as a bloody shambles.†   (source)
  • There was no doubt, it was a shambles.†   (source)
  • But the room was a dreadful shambles.†   (source)
  • She found the buffet, and found it in shambles, a feast raided by animals or Vikings, and made her way to the nearest bar, which was out of Riesling and was now offering only some kind of vodka-and-energy drink concoction.†   (source)
  • In her version, he is a man rightfully worried over the well-being of a deeply unhappy and self-destructive daughter who cannot help making shambles of her own life.†   (source)
  • It's hard to see because the place is a shambles, but it looks like they were growing in rows.†   (source)
  • He followed Gala Placidia along the arcaded corridor, passed by the window of the sewing room where Florentino Ariza had seen Fermina Daza for the first time, when the patio was still a shambles, climbed the new marble stairs to the second floor, and waited to be announced before going into the patient's bedroom.†   (source)
  • The garage—our indestructible bunker—was a shambles.†   (source)
  • The shambles this struggle became is most evident in the section on Pauline Breedlove, where I resorted to two voices, hers and the urging narrator's, both of which are extremely unsatisfactory to me.†   (source)
  • And when they got out, most of those who were sick didn't get treated, mainly because Russia's huge civilian tb control system was itself in shambles.†   (source)
  • A shambles ensued: people on both sides of the bridge hurried to try to help; the risk of fire was significant and a major alarm was sounded.†   (source)
  • All around him, his beautiful new ship was in shambles.†   (source)
  • The place was a shambles.†   (source)
  • The elephant also stands and then shambles around to present Marlena with her tail.†   (source)
  • The city was in shambles.†   (source)
  • She was fresh out of college with an accounting degree, and his finances were a shambles.†   (source)
  • Back across his memory came the picture of Johnnie with her poor little sheep for the shambles clustered about her on the bridge before the Victory mill.†   (source)
  • That's guaranteed to turn that dance floor into a shambles.†   (source)
  • At the far end of the courtyard, Saphira crouched over the corpses of her kills, the area around her a shambles.†   (source)
  • Maglie's already in the clubhouse sitting in his skivvies in that postgame state of disrepair and pit stink that might pass for some shambles of the inner man, slugging beer from the bottle.†   (source)
  • His mind was a shambles.†   (source)
  • Sixteen moons, sixteen years
    Sound of thunder in your ears
    Sixteen miles before she nears
    Sixteen seeks what sixteen fears ….
    Over her shoulder, I could see her room was in shambles.†   (source)
  • The room was a shambles—furniture smashed into splinters, drawers opened and their contents scattered.†   (source)
  • By noon, their case was in shambles.†   (source)
  • With its paper money nearly worthless, its economy in shambles, the United States was desperate for trade, yet without the power or prestige to make demands, or even, it seemed, to qualify for respect.†   (source)
  • He saw Brother Eugene still standing there in the midst of the shambles, tears actually running down his cheeks.†   (source)
  • "I never needed a vacation," she said in a trembling voice, "but she's made a shambles of my life!"†   (source)
  • "Here now, chap, I daresay if it weren't for my charity, your standing would be a shambles and your family in the workhouse."†   (source)
  • It's a shambles.†   (source)
  • The victims return to their lives--which are often in shambles--and hours later I find myself face-to-face with the perpetrators.†   (source)
  • I went back to work once we learned that I was clear, which was Thursday that same week when Alvarez read into Zebra file an account of shambles at Stilyagi Hall.†   (source)
  • Obviously the leadership was a shambles, and Bourne knew why.†   (source)
  • If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so.†   (source)
  • By nightfall, they would be stopped outside the radioactive shambles of Jacksonville.†   (source)
  • The place had reduced me to such a shambles of absolute impotence that I found that I could not even indulge myself in my occasional autoerotic diversions, and was reduced to performing furtive pocket jobs during midnight strolls through Washington Square.†   (source)
  • My shop was a shambles.†   (source)
  • When he came round again to The Slide he saw that the shambles at the corner had involved two cars only; the Thunderbird lay inverted fifty yards from the track and the Bentley stood with its rear end crushed and a great pool of petrol on the road.†   (source)
  • Now, too late, when the city opened out so softly in beauty and to such distances, it awoke a longing for that careless, patched land of Mississippi winter, trees in their rusty wrappers, slow-grown trees taking their time, the lost shambles of old cane, the winter swamp where his own twin brother, he supposed, still hunted.†   (source)
  • I take it most of Earth's a shambles, but the war goes on.†   (source)
  • 'And don't think I've forgotten about this shambles.†   (source)
  • The safe room was in a shambles, blown apart by some sort of fairy flatulence.†   (source)
  • "-a total shambles," the dark-haired guy was saying as I slid in.†   (source)
  • The house behind the lawn had also run to riot; it was a gray, paint-peeling, roof-sagging shambles.†   (source)
  • He averted his eyes from the shambles before them.†   (source)
  • Andersson surveyed the shambles all around him.†   (source)
  • And even if it's true, it'll just be another shambles.†   (source)
  • I felt weak and hopeless, with a central part of me in shambles.†   (source)
  • Lying full-length upon the floor is his landlady, Mrs. Humphrey, in a shambles of broken crockery and ruined food.†   (source)
  • The cabin was a shambles, the stools overturned, the shelf swept bare, the precious molasses keg upside down on the floor and empty.†   (source)
  • Then he went back upstairs to his own rooms, with a slop pail he'd located; the kitchen had been a shambles.†   (source)
  • But there was one part in all this that he could not think through, one indistinct shape that the shambles twelve miles outside Dunkirk could not reduce to a simple outline.†   (source)
  • The room was a shambles.†   (source)
  • What she had to tell, you would scarcely credit, of two such outwardly respectable people, with screams and groans and horrifying goings-on at night, as bad as a haunted house, and the bed linen a shambles every morning, and in such a state as made her blush to look at it.†   (source)
  • When Jackie had borrowed the Dodge and started to drive back at 12:30, the town was a panicky shambles.†   (source)
  • He had come on board recently to clean up the shambles of what was known as the Internal Bureau affair, and was already on his way to a higher position within the police hierarchy.†   (source)
  • She gets up and shambles away on swollen feet, old socks poking through the holes in her rubber boots, glancing back over her shoulder.†   (source)
  • It also made a shambles of the economy, among other ways by creating a bunch of new state-owned enterprises and with them new opportunities for cronyism and corruption.†   (source)
  • An affable sort of human shambles in a tropical shirt and slapdash beard—he's in a lively mood today because he has managed to rig a system in the building that produces enough power to run a TV set.†   (source)
  • Who's made a shambles of your life?" croaked Mr. McDaniels, straining weakly to lift his head away from the greasy topknot that now tickled his nose.†   (source)
  • Considering everything that had been done to him, his foot now no more than a painfully awkward dead weight surgically encased in stolen flesh, a once brilliant career a shambles, his personal life filled with a loneliness that only a total commitment to the Agency could bring about — a devotion not reciprocated what right had anyone else to turn?†   (source)
  • A sweetness gathered in his breast as he saw the room being turned into a shambles, a sweet moment of triumph that compensated for all the other lousy things, his terrible marks, the black box.†   (source)
  • Laughed in sheer and healthy delight, in relief that she was finally here and in physical anticipation as well, and he laughed at the shambles they were going to make of the camping trip they were taking and he laughed in the end because he couldn't help it.†   (source)
  • Kee-ripes, what a shambles!†   (source)
  • The drop was a shambles from the start.†   (source)
  • Had a typhoon swept through the Pink Palace, there could not have been a more horrendous effect of havoc and shambles.†   (source)
  • GUIL (leaping up): What a shambles!†   (source)
  • He had me cold—I must have known it as soon as I heard myself utter the word "ticks"—and the grin that had appeared briefly on his face, a sardonic flash of teeth and a twinkle that recognized the shambles of my defeat, dissolved even as he now firmly lowered his glass.†   (source)
  • From this get-together I had come back unhappily to the Pink Palace, expecting to find the same abandonment and ruination I remembered from that evening—certainly not anticipating the presence of Sophie, whom I discovered, miraculously, in the shambles of her room, stuffing her last odds and ends into a dilapidated suitcase.†   (source)
  • Her cottage is generally a shambles and smells of boiled cabbage.†   (source)
  • Who wouldn't be if he felt like a calf being led to the shambles?†   (source)
  • It was not wide enough either to carry all the transport for an offensive and the Austrians could make a shambles out of it.†   (source)
  • If past memories did stir up in him, Dr. Sasaki had come to be able to live with his one bitter regret: that in the shambles of the Red Cross Hospital in those first days after the bombing it had not been possible, beyond a certain point, to keep track of the identities of hose whose corpses were dragged out to the mass cremations, with the result that nameless souls might still, all these years later, be hovering there, unattended and dissatisfied.†   (source)
  • But Eugene couldn't follow his barn-yard passion: the strong henstench, the Tarkintonian paint-smell, and the rank-mired branchsmell which mined under the filthy shambles of the backyard, stopped him.†   (source)
  • Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters.†   (source)
  • No live buffalo were in sight, but the carcasses left by the advancing hunters polluted the summer air and made of the prairie a hideous shambles.†   (source)
  • A few of the boldest and wisest forsook the fires of the gods, which had now become a shambles, and fled into the forest, where, in the end, they starved to death or were eaten by wolves.†   (source)
  • His eyes were blinded so that he could not set, and the blood running from ears and nose and mouth turned the cabin into a shambles.†   (source)
  • The round-house was like a shambles; three were dead inside, another lay in his death agony across the threshold; and there were Alan and I victorious and unhurt.†   (source)
  • His mind was a shambles.†   (source)
  • …round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the Circus, and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold, and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his…†   (source)
  • The prairie became a gruesome, ghastly shambles; and the camps were almost untenable because of flies and bugs, ticks and mosquitoes.†   (source)
  • So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Institute of Biology, and in a month that Institute became a shambles.†   (source)
  • He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become so overcrowded, to become such a universal slavepacked shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamper for existence.†   (source)
  • Jo, repeating, "Ony you tell the young lady as I never went fur to hurt her and wot the genlmn ses!" nods and shambles and shivers, and smears and blinks, and half laughs and half cries, a farewell to her, and takes his creeping way along after Allan Woodcourt, close to the houses on the opposite side of the street.†   (source)
  • If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine.†   (source)
  • When about to be sent to the same market, an older sister went to the shambles, to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims.†   (source)
  • Cooking utensils of the simplest sort were lying near the fire, a few articles of clothing were to be seen in or around the huts, rifles, horns, and pouches leaned against the trees, or were suspended from the lower branches, and the carcasses of two or three deer were stretched to view on the same natural shambles.†   (source)
  • "Begone, then; and if thou wilt do mine errand, and if thou return hither when it is done, thou shalt see Saxon flesh cheap as ever was hog's in the shambles of Sheffield.†   (source)
  • A stone post rose in the midst, to which the oxen had formerly been tied for baiting with dogs to make them tender before they were killed in the adjoining shambles.†   (source)
  • The place was a shambles.†   (source)
  • A boy inept at battle.
    Oh I'd swing to attack if I had the power in me.
    By god, it's intolerable, what they do—disgrace,
    my house a shambles!
    You should be ashamed yourselves,
    mortified in the face of neighbors living round about!
    Fear the gods' wrath—before they wheel in outrage
    and make these crimes recoil on your heads.
    I beg you by Olympian Zeus, by Themis too,
    who sets assemblies free and calls us into session—
    stop, my friends!†   (source)
  • …rich fat,
    now bring my prayer to pass!
    Let that man come back—some god guide him now!
    He'd toss to the winds the flashy show you make,
    Melanthius, so cocksure—always strutting round the town
    while worthless fieldhands leave your flocks a shambles!"
    "Listen to him!" the goatherd shouted back.
    "All bark and no bite from the vicious mutt!
    One fine day I'll ship him out in a black lugger,
    miles from Ithaca—sell him off for a good stiff price!
    Just let Apollo shoot Telemachus down…†   (source)
  • The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.†   (source)
  • Calling encouraging words he shambles back with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the setter into a dark stalestunk corner.†   (source)
  • O, ay; as summer flies are in the shambles, That quicken even with blowing.†   (source)
  • Yet I glory More in the cunning purchase of my wealth, Than in the glad possession; since I gain No common way; I use no trade, no venture; I wound no earth with plough-shares; fat no beasts, To feed the shambles; have no mills for iron, Oil, corn, or men, to grind them into powder: I blow no subtle glass; expose no ships To threat'nings of the furrow-faced sea; I turn no monies in the public bank, Nor usure private.†   (source)
  • As to our City of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose, in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.†   (source)
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