"White elephant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to visit Mrs. Jones, who lives at 28, White Elephant Buildings. Mr. Jones is a painter at work for eight months in the year, if he has good luck, but out of work always at that time of the year when housekeeping expenses are highest. For every working man's wife will tell you ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... have bestowed what to us appear as ridiculous titles of honour on their princes. The king of Arracan assumes the following ones: "Emperor of Arracan, possessor of the white elephant, and the two ear-rings, and in virtue of this possession legitimate heir of Pegu and Brama; lord of the twelve provinces of Bengal, and the twelve kings who place ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... white elephant in Miss Emily's window. Painfully she had seen her supply dwindle. For this last of the herd, she had a feeling far in excess of his value, such as a collector might have for a rare coin of a certain minting, or a bit of pottery of a ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... they climb its slopes. High up among its temples and monasteries marched processions of monks, with intoned services, and many prostrations, and lighted candles that glimmer through the fog. There in their solemn shrines stood the statues of the Arahats, and there, seated on his white elephant, loomed immense and dim, the image of Amitabha, the Lord ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... me of a singular fact, little known. The Burmahs, who are disciples of Gaudma, equally with the inhabitants of Pegu and Syriam, whose country they have conquered, worship the White Elephant, who is considered as a god. There have been but three white elephants since the foundation of the Burmah dynasty by Alompraa. The first one is dead, and I have one of his teeth carved with figures, which was consecrated to the great Dagon Pagoda. The second now reigns—he is attended by hundreds, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... has indeed descended in the form of Krishna and retires to his abode. Krishna then sets the hill down in its former place. Following this discomfiture, Indra comes down from the sky accompanied by his white elephant and by Surabhi, the cow of plenty. He offers his submission to ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... on his return to Karugsar and Mazinderan, Zal went with Rustem to Sistan, a province dependent on his government, and settled him there. The white elephant, belonging to Minuchihr, was kept at Sistan. One night Rustem was awakened out of his sleep by a great noise, and cries of distress when starting up and inquiring the cause, he was told that the white elephant had got loose, and ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... money in 'Pan-America' long before Unger ever dreamed of producing it. I sicked him onto 'The Official Chaperon' when every manager in town had turned it down. I went down and seen 'em doing 'The White Elephant' in a Yiddish theater and wired Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it for Broadway. Where's it got me? Nowhere. Because I whiled away the best fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, when I came down here too late in life, got in the rut of a salaried ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... both our names," said Gyali, holding the hat before Desiderius: "draw one of them out: open it, read it, and then put both names into the fire. The one whose name you draw will do the honors to the Cochin-China Emperor's white elephant." ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... of inheritance, he had come into the property with an immense antipathy:—a white elephant that would bring him neither profit nor honour, but which the modest competence that he had previously enjoyed did not allow him to refuse. It had altered the tenor of his existence, destroyed his youth and his ambitions, and represented for many years, more completely ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... said, became envious of the prosperity of a washerman, and to ruin him, induced the king to order him to wash one of his black elephants white, that he might be "lord of the white elephant," which in the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... minds provokingly low prices, his Harleian bargains. By the way, he kept them a tolerably long time. Did some one help him to find the money, or did he pay it by instalments? Seriously speaking, it was rather a white elephant. One of the most notorious private transactions in the way of sales of books en bloc was that by the Royal Society in 1873 of the printed portion of the Pirkheimer Library, presented to it by ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... to be missing at a first glance is a white elephant; but the farm is that itself in a sense, as one may readily imagine, when the difficulty of keeping it stocked ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... Krishna's arrows and smitten with the force of his discus, became motionless like waifs and strays stranded on the bank by the violence of the waves. Then Sakra the lord of the celestials, riding on his white elephant, rushed at those heroes, and taking up his thunderbolt which could never go in vain, hurled it with great force. And the slayer of Asuras said unto the gods, 'These two are slain.' Beholding the fierce thunderbolt ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... correctly said to have as much truth as poetry. It is a graceful summary of the curiosities which Barnum had brought before the world up to his sixtieth year. It does not include the Sacred White Elephant of Siam, the mammoth Jumbo and other wonders of nature which he was yet to reveal to astonished and delighted millions. Nor does it indicate that grand genius of aggregation by which in later years he surpassed all his previous performances—masterly as they were. Not till the veteran ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... A milk-white elephant or a camelopard is considered more than a substitute for character, incident, or wit. And if an actor presents himself in a dress of unusual splendour, the house is in ecstasies, and a roar of applause, loud as a ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... least, came the "White Elephant" with which the reader is already acquainted—the line from ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... in hand, he leaped the six-foot wall in the mouth of the roaring cannon, over the heads of the gleaming pikes; when, with one hand seizing the sacred peishcush, or fish—which was the banner always borne before Scindiah,—he, with his good sword, cut off the trunk of the famous white elephant, which, shrieking with agony, plunged madly into the Mahratta ranks, followed by his giant brethren, tossing, like chaff before the wind, the affrighted kitmatgars. He, meanwhile, now plunging into the midst of a battalion of consomahs, now cleaving to the chine a screaming and ferocious bobbachee,* ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... been very beautiful, Antipas with melancholy retrospection reflected; and he fancied her more luminous than the twelve signs of the zodiac, lounging nonchalantly in a palanquin that a white elephant with swaying tail balanced on his painted back. And even as she returned, with a child perhaps, to the griffons of the fabulous Yemen whence she came, Antipas noted a speck on the horizon that grew from minim into mountain, and obscured the entire sky. He saw the empire ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... I do with her? She will be a white elephant to me. I am not her father; I do not think I understand girls—or boys, or men. I ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin |
