What is "shambles"

Usage examples of "shambles".

Her decks were a smoking shambles of ripped and twisted metal and over her up-wind side hung the lines by which part of her crew had taken to the sea.

Precious was in shambles, with fires burning in several places, and the integrity of the walls and the strong gates seemed in question.

South Dade residents have only lost millions of dollars to swindlers, licensed and unlicensed, who have taken the money and left the houses in shambles.

And beyond them, slate roofs hunching like shoulders in the cold, rotten walls held at the point of collapse by buttresses and organic cement, stinking a unique stink, was the shambles of Kinken.

Wolf gene pack dynamics, serotonin shutout and Envoy psychosis to pilot the whole fucking shambles.

On three hills rising on the promontory that overlooked the sea rose the remains of a great city, now vandalized and tumbled into a shambles that nevertheless left those who approached it gaping in wonder at the columns and archways, the broken aqueducts and fallen walls, the intricate layout of a grand city that had once ruled the Middle Sea.

Once more his laboratory became a shambles of cluttered flasks and hurrying assistants and tinkling glassware and sputtering, bubbling pots of yeast soup.

The servant shambles into the hall, its shuffling footfalls leaving behind whispering echoes in the all-but-empty palace.

By that time, Franz Dokken expected to have reduced Atlas society to a shambles, crushed every one of the rival landholders, and picked up the pieces in his own hands.

Le Roy was an unsalvageable shambles by now, and the Robinson fantasia that Farrell tried next came out equally as muddy.

The Veery Brothers, professional effigy makers, run an establishment south of the Shambles at Second and Market Streets, by the Court House.

Neither has slept well for a Fortnight, amid the house-rocking Ponderosities of commercial Drayage, the Barrels and Sledges rumbling at all Hours over the paving-Stones, the Town on a-hammering and brick-laying itself together about them, the street-sellers' cries, the unforeseen coalescences of Sailors and Citizens anywhere in the neighboring night to sing Liberty and wreak Mischief, hoofbeats in large numbers passing beneath the Window, the cries of Beasts from the city Shambles, Philadelphia in the Dark, in an all-night Din Residents may have got accustom'd to, but which seems to the Astronomers, not yet detach'd from the liquid, dutiful lurches of the Packet thro' th' October seas, the very Mill of Hell.

Later, across Susquehanna, there come days when the only Inns are worse than no Inn, and presently days when there are no Inns at all, and at last the night they encamp knowing that for an unforeseeable stretch of Nights, they must belong to this great Swell of Forested Mountains, this place of ancient Revenge, and Beasts outside the Fire-light, the sun this particular evening as if in celestial Seal, spreading into a Glory, transgressing all Metes and Bounds, filling the Trees, lighting the Animals, their flanks averted, wash'd in its oncoming Flow, bringing to human faces a precision approaching purification, goading each soul, as if again and again, ever toward the Shambles of Eternity.

His hands rip at his clothes, then he turns and shambles from the stable scratching his neck, and pulling at his garments.

If we can't find this Caxton, that is what we will both have on our bands: a shambles.