"Searing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had clutched it in his hand, a handful of it. Exactly like a great flame rose the simultaneous yell of the crowd as the boy jerked and got the flag loose. He had torn it down. A tremendous prolonged yell, touched with a snarl of triumph, and searing like a puff of flame, sounded as the boy remained for one moment with the flag in his hand looking down at the crowd below. His face was odd and elated and still. Then with the slightest gesture he threw the flag from him, and Aaron watched the gaudy remnant falling towards ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... too big, to have written this with himself in mind; yet no reader of the scathing, searing arraignment called "Yama," will question that the great, the gigantic Kuprin has shown "the burdens and abominations" of prostitution, in "simple, fine, and deathlessly-caustic images"; has shown that "all the horror ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... converge on one minute fragment of wreckage—one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it—the full circuit of our orb—laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about Huckley—where and what it might be, and how it talked—it knew how it danced—and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the zealous, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... its idol doomed to part! Yet a twofold being bearing, She and I apart are tearing; She to heaven I to hell! Going, going! Hark the bell! Far in hell, Tolling, tolling. Fiends are rolling, Whitened bones, and coffins reeking, Fearful darkness grimly creeping On my soul, My vision searing, She disappearing, Drawn from me By a soul I cannot see, Whom I know can never love her. Oh! that soul could I discover, I would go, Steeped in woe, Down to darkness, down to hell! ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... the old man. But tears would no longer wash away a conviction which was taking possession of him, searing his soul as the flames seared the pines. 'Why did you let them? Aren't you ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... do it again. Believe me, sir, it is your only chance. It would grieve me much to hear the searing-iron hiss on your stumps. I bargained with Tob to get clear of the harbour forts before the chain was up for the night, and as he is a very daring fellow, with no fear of navigating under the darkness, he himself said he would come to a point ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... trimming the wall frequently and keeping the feet in balance and the careful selection of breeding stock. Resting the animal, keeping the foot that has the ring-bone on it in proper balance and counterirritation by means of blisters and cautery (searing) are important lines of treatment. Shortening the toe and raising the heel, if necessary, greatly relieves the lameness in some cases. Sectioning the sensory nerves that go to the part should not be practised, unless ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... announcement of Lush as a sort of searing operation that she had to go through. The facts that galled her gathered a burning power when she thought of their lying in his mind. It was all a part of that new gambling, in which the losing was not simply a minus, but a terrible plus that had ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... this same way of looking at things which takes 'It is expedient' as the determining consideration, has in it an awful power of so twisting and searing a man's conscience as that he comes to look at evil and never to know that there is anything wrong in it. This cynical high priest in our text had no conception that he was doing anything but obeying the plainest dictates of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... a minute, will ye?" he said quietly, and his captors, thinking perhaps that he wanted to say something to me, stopped. The mountain youth turned a strangely sobered face and fixed his blue eyes on the engineer as though he were searing every feature of that imperturbable young man in his brain forever. It was not a bad face, but the avenging hatred in it was fearful. Then he, too, saw the Blight, his face calmed magically and he, too, stared at her, and turned away with an oath checked at his lips. We went on—the Blight ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... a course against an unfortunate author. We must, nevertheless, be permitted to protest, that we do feel a considerable quantity of very honest and virtuous indignation against the trash last put forth by Miladi—quite as much, we are sure, as impelled Juvenal to the composition of his searing satires. We may be told, however, that we are waging battle with a lady, and that we should be upon our guard not to give fresh cause for the exclamation, that "the age of chivalry is gone." A lady, true; but, when in ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... "playing fair" according to her lights, in the path before her, but nothing could save her from a mental nausea of the things in her husband which belonged to his plebeian origin and nature, and which crossed with a shrivelling, searing touch her own ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... searing sunlight. The Sunside of Mercury blazed below them. Out toward the velvet dark of space the side of a waiting ship flashed ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... cold, which was already almost insupportable, suddenly increased, as it not infrequently does in that country before the snow. Then a white powder was whirled into her face, filling her eyes and searing the skin, while the horses were plunging at a gallop through a filmy haze, and Winston, whitened all over, leaned forward with lowered head hurling hoarse encouragement at them. His voice reached her fitfully through the roar of wind, until sight and hearing were lost alike as the white haze closed ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... Marquis raised his head, and showed a face that pain was searing. He held out his hand. "Very well, Charles. Serve me in this, and count me ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... those myriads whilst indulging the most appalling passions—their hands filled with weapons of carnage, their hearts with fratricidal hate. It is the sense of the moral death involved, searing of conscience, deadening of heart, blunting of moral faculty, fruits of death brought forth in the soul of the survivor, which are more horrifying to the enlightened consciousness than the dying groans of the stricken can be to the more bodily nerve. The thing to fear is not ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... followed him in silence, and now she stood still, The key! The key! It seemed to be searing her flesh, burning through to her very heart. She suddenly felt as if all the Fates were arrayed against her. Why—why—why had she chosen that drawer to guard her secret? Yet how could she have foreseen this? A mist swam before her eyes. Her ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... of pain was the worst. He had never had any idea that pain could endure so long, could burn with such a white and searing flame. He ground his teeth together, he chewed his tongue through, he gound his face upon the stones. Anything for a respite—even a new kind of pain, that he might forget the screaming ache in his ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... over the next ridge and out of sight. But the men were too fiercely beset by the confusion to notice their loss. There was no question of facing the wind, for it was more cruel than the fierce breath of an open furnace, searing the ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... represented long experience. For this assistance we are particularly indebted to: M. Shaler Allen, Bruce Millar, Mrs. Herbert Q. Brown, and George S. Platts; also, to House & Garden, in which parts of this book appeared serially; and to Miss Eleanor V. Searing for many ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... when they could, which was even less often. And at the end of the fourth day there came a blinding fall of snow and sleet, which drifted down the companion, sheeted the ropes with ice, and hung the yards with icicles, and which made every inch of brass a searing-iron and every yard of the deck ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... life, working undaunted although the flames were threatening, every moment, to explode the magazine; a year later, captured by the Indians, who feared and hated him, he was bound to a stake, after some preliminary tortures, and a pile of fagots heaped about him and set on fire. The flames were searing his flesh, when a French officer happened to come up and rescued him. These are but three incidents out of a dozen such. He seemed to bear a charmed life, and any of his men would willingly have died for him. In 1765, when he returned home ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... desperado; and like a wild Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to run amuck at heaven and earth. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... comprehend, had yet flung her fear aside for the sake of him whom she loved with a love so bitter-costly, and now she stood at his side, fiercely clutching him, and taunting him like a tigress with his unmanly fears. Ah, had that clutch upon his elbow been the searing grasp of white-heated pincers, eating to the bone, it had not stirred him. He stood there, a tall, large-limbed man, brown and weather-stained, one who had endured much, wrinkled somewhat, care-marked about the brow, but very capable, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... distance he could make it out, a twisting, turning, almost writhing thing, cutting into the side of the mountain, a jagged scar, searing its way up the range in flights that seemed at times to run almost perpendicular and which faded, only to reappear again, like the trail of some gigantic cut-worm, mark above mark, as it circled the smaller hills, cut into the higher ones, was lost at the edge of some great ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... rightly—fairly? The greatest masters have looked askant and jealous at their pupils' works. And then, how slow, how cold, how damned cold, how indifferently he spoke; why, the very art should have warmed him more. Could he have—No, no, no: it was true, it was! I felt the conviction thrill through me like a searing iron. Burn it—did he say—ay—burn it: it shall ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... woes to Europe and to it, chargeable to that score. Which appears even yet not to be completed?—Perhaps not, even yet. For it is the penalty of being loyal to Enchanted Wiggeries; of living cheek-by-jowl with lies of a peaceable quality, and stuffing your nostrils, and searing your soul, against the accursed odor they all have!—For I can assure you the curse of Heaven does dwell in one and all of them; and the son of Adam cannot too soon get quit of their bad partnership, cost ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... The awful, soul-searing tragedy of Europe's great war of 1914 came to most men unexpectedly. The real progress of the world during the five years preceding the war had been remarkable. All thinkers saw that the course of human civilization was being changed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... fine, beautiful old face lit up with as great a generosity as warmed theirs. He was very fond of his "boys." If he must show them what was impracticable in their views he did it gently. He rallied them with tenderness. He had none of the mockery which is so searing and blighting a thing ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... father and mother Creators of him. Thus man is, by absolute inheritance, the king, and the ruler over all nature. But not without effort can he enter and possess and maintain his power over his own. Ice and frosts, and searing sun, and lonely wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles—all, all he must encounter and set at naught in his trackless journey. Carefully must he force the wilderness to ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... this remark was obvious, and it was the nearest he ever came to uttering the conviction that had been formed in that illuminating five minutes upstairs. If he suspected,—and I think he did,—he preferred not to ask the questions that must have been searing his curious brain. It was a truly wonderful demonstration of self-restraint. I would have given much to have been able to read his innermost thoughts, to watch the perplexed movements of ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... he was, he might have been a young god descending on a shaft of sunshine from Olympus. But the thought that darted all unbidden through Anne's mind was of something far different. She banished it on the instant with startled precipitancy; but it left a scar behind that burned like the sudden searing of a hot iron. "I beheld Satan ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... prevailed, for sore disease had scourged the low and high, And the hail of God had fallen and crushed the growing grain, And a fire no hand had kindled in searing wrath swept by— Such fire as none had seen before—as ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... chance of his being hit by bullets. They pass overhead as a rule. It is when a man is kneeling or standing, or between the two positions that the great danger lies. The lad Bob and I were just in the act of rising when mine came along. I felt no more than a stinging blow in the right shoulder, a searing cut and a thud of pain as the bullet exploded in leaving my body. I fell on my face and ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... in hand. But Blaine was prepared for him this time. He wasn't going to witness another murder—not now. Flinging Tom Farley aside, he let loose a terrific jab that landed full on Pegrani's mouth. The ray pistol crackled harmlessly, its deadly energy spending itself in searing the metal of ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... heat of the day in the bottom of the well, floating about like a frog in the brine, but as evening came on he crawled out dripping and saddled up and packed in haste. Every cinch-ring was searing hot, even the wood and leather burned him, and as he threw on the packs he lifted one foot after the other in a devil's dance over the hot sands. It was hot even for Death Valley, the hottest place in North America, but there was no use in waiting for it to cool. Wunpost soused ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... to see you, Mr. Bulmer," she said simply. And, in that hour of searing agony, she meant it, for it is easier to look back on suffering than to await it, and she had been living in dread of this meeting for many ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... soul-life for her; certainly here was a moment of reversion to a condition of unplumbed progenital influences; the scorching anger arising from such a primitive situation was in itself primal. Hence the emotion no less that the experience itself was novel; clean, searing anger. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... which the railroad left the valley. He had been looking longingly toward that door of escape all his life, and now he said goodby to it. "Ah, well, 'twan't to be," he said, with an accent of weary finality; but then, suddenly out of the chill which oppressed his heart there sprang a last searing blast of astonished anguish. It was as if he realized for the first time all that had befallen him since the morning. He was racked by a horrified desolation that made his sturdy old body stagger as if under an unexpected blow. As he reeled he flung his arm about ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... buried itself in my shoulder; a long knife, thrown by a practised hand, pierced the muscles of my thigh, and stuck there quivering, till I struck it loose; and twice they fired at me, the second shot tearing the flesh of my side, searing it like fire. Yet I scarcely realized I was touched, so fiercely was the battle-blood now coursing through my veins, so intense the joy with which I crushed them back. I grew delirious, feeling the rage to slay sweep over me as never before, giving me the crazed strength of a dozen ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... blind traps in the way of shell holes, strings of barbed wire, overturned carts, broken branches of trees, flung stones and beams; and always, whether his journey was a short one or a long, he would move in an atmosphere of risk, with sudden death or searing pain passing him by at every step, and waiting for him, as he well knew, at the next step and the next and every other ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... or gentler than Millie Splay's utterance. But it was like a searing iron to the shoulders ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason |
