"White-hot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worth more in wealth and influence than all the rest of the Republic's territory. He would get even with Gamacho by-and-by. And Senor Gamacho's oration, delectable to popular ears, went on in the heat and glare of the Plaza like the uncouth howlings of an inferior sort of devil cast into a white-hot furnace. Every moment he had to wipe his streaming face with his bare fore-arm; he had flung off his coat, and had turned up the sleeves of his shirt high above the elbows; but he kept on his head the large ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... hammering, smashing blows of Bob MacNair's big fists. Felt the tightening of the huge arms like steel bands about his body when he rushed to a clinch—bands that crushed and burned so that each sobbing breath seemed a blade, white-hot from the furnace, stabbing and searing into his tortured lungs. Felt the vital force and strength of him ebb and weaken so that the lean, slender fingers that groped for MacNair's throat closed feebly and dropped limp ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... granular appearance. Of course, to be visible at all at 92,830,000 miles the cloudlets cannot be small. They imply enormous activity in the photosphere. If we might speak picturesquely the sun's surface resembles a boiling ocean of white-hot metal vapours. We have to-day a wonderful instrument, which will be described later, which dilutes, as it were, the general glare of the sun, and enables us to observe these fiery eruptions at any hour. The "oceans" of red-hot gas and white-hot metal ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... we might pass through unobserved, and I took it; but I was white-hot with rage and I dare say my aggressive bearing bewrayed me. In threading our way to the door I brushed accidentally against Mistress Westerleigh. She drew aside haughtily, then gave a little scream ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... much satire in the Manx character, and next to no cynicism at all. The true Manxman is white-hot. I have heard of one, John Gale, called the Manx Burns, who lampooned the upstarts about him, and also of one, Tom the Dipper, an itinerant Manx bard, who sang at fairs; but in a general way the Manx bard has been a deadly earnest person, most at home in churchyards. There was one such, akin ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... milky glass—apparently decomposing, throwing out filmy threads of clear glass and bubbles of glass which break, liberating a gas (fluorine?) which, attacking the white-hot platinum, causes rings of color to appear round the specimen. I have now been using the apparatus for nearly a month, and in its earliest days it led me right in the diagnosis of a microscopical mineral, iolite, not before found in our Irish granite, I think. The unlooked-for characters ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... business from their fathers, for such an ill-assorted pair would never have been joined together from choice. Many of their discussions ended in stormy words, but never before had Martin's dark face showed such white-hot, quivering rage as when he arose now, gathered up his papers, and went away to his own room, closing the door smartly behind him. Cicely got up also and went down the long countingroom to where her father ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... need not be afraid—of me!" said the girl, with white-hot scorn. "I'd rather die by inches of leprosy than belong to you now. You are clever, though. And I was easy to deal with, wasn't I? And I cared so much! I dare say it was really your hair and beard, but I honestly thought you a sort of ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... wrath. Upon this mood there followed the sharpest violence of remorse; and to that again, as he recalled his provocation, anger succeeded afresh. So he was tossed in spirit; now bewailing his inconsequence and lack of temper, now flaming up in white-hot indignation and a noble pity ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still in this half-somnolent, semidetached frame of mind that he rode into a sudden white-hot ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... at the door watching him seize a piece of steel with the tongs, whisk it out of the forge with a flourish that sent the white-hot scintillations flying through the place, bang it down on the anvil, and then beat it ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... and several others duly delivered he strode blithely away, and the little canyon resounded with the blows of his heavy sledge as he attacked with renewed spirit the great forging, white-hot from his soak-pit, which was to become the shaft of his turbo-alternator. Nadia watched him for a moment, her very heart in her eyes, then picked up her spanner and went after more steel, breathing a long and tremulous, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... incandescence, where now only the stone chimney stood—and this, too, was already cracking and swaying—Brevard had found his tomb, together with the two Air Trust spies. All that pleasant, necessary place was now a mass of white-hot ruin; all those books and pictures now had ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... placed. Through the tubulure of the retort there passes a bent glass-tube, T E, perforated near the closed end, F, with a number of small holes. (The perforations are easily made by piercing the partially softened glass with a white-hot steel needle; an ordinary crotchet needle, the hook having been removed and the end sharpened, answers the purpose very well.) The end, T, of the glass tube is connected by caoutchouc tubing with the coal-gas supply, the perforated end dipping into the sulphur. The neck of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... the fences warped and dyed With the white-hot noons and their withering fires, Where the rough bees trample the creamy bosoms Of the hanging tufts of the elder blossoms, And the spiders weave, and the grey snakes hide, In the crannied gloom of the stones ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... the King is a matter of State,' says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he was going against his better mind. He walked out of the Council-room, and the others sat still, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... by either side is white-hot indignation at the iniquities of the other side. The striking teamster complacently takes a scab driver into an alley, and with an iron bar breaks his arms, so that he can drive no more, but cries out to high Heaven for ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... white with the pallor of repressed emotion, and his eyes were like the blue flame that one sees flashing above a bed of white-hot coals. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... swifter than the wind. Then he put the coat of mail about his shoulders, and fitted a helmet on his head, and took the great sword which Vulcan had made for Daunus his father, and had dipped it when it was white-hot in the river of Styx. His spear also he took where it stood against a pillar, saying, "Serve me well, my spear, that hast never failed me before, that I may lay low this womanish robber of Phrygia, and soil with dust his curled and perfumed hair." The next day the ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... not know that certainly, for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,—broadly burning, rather than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From that sun, clear back to the first avant-courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim—yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven—ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the renewed determination, dusted off and re-pedestaled after many days. As to the manner of conducting the war against inequality and the crime of plutocracy, the plan of campaign had been sufficiently indicated in that white-hot moment of high resolves on the cargo-deck of the Belle Julie. For the propaganda, there was his book; for the demonstration, he would put the sacred fund into some industry where the weight of it would give him the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... rampart fell, crushing the fire, and through the diminished din of it the voice of the little old lunatic came clearer. In the heart of that white-hot hell he was singing like a bird. What he was singing it was not very easy to follow, but it seemed to be something about playing in the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... enquires whether the glowing matter which forms the globe is a solid mass, or, if not solid, which is it, liquid or gaseous? At the first glance we might think that the sun cannot be fluid, and we might naturally imagine that it was a solid ball of some white-hot substance. But this view is not correct; for we can show that the sun is certainly not a solid body in so far at least as ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... again, and broke it into many pieces; and for three days he welded it in a white-hot fire, and tempered it with milk and oatmeal. Then, in sight of Mimer and the sneering apprentices, he cast a light ball of fine-spun wool upon the flowing water of the brook; and it was caught in the swift eddies of the stream, and whirled about until it met the bared blade of the sword, ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... bellies with famine, but they were a breed schooled through generations for this fight against nature. In this junk-shop of the world, rattlesnakes were rulers of the soil. Overhead the buzzards, ominous black specks pendant against the white-hot ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... His throat was like a furnace flue, his mouth held the taste of leather. But for that thirst, indeed, he could hardly have found the energy to aid her efforts and lurch upon an elbow. A white-hot lancet pierced his wound, and though he locked his teeth against it a groan forced out between them. The woman cried out at the rapid ebb of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... had tramped the wet lanes, but to-day he seemed to me a wicked fool, justly punished for his folly. For I knew, though no one had told me, that I should never be the same after this sickness. The very fibres of my soul had been twisted and burned in that white-hot furnace of my delirium, and though Nature might forgive me, she could never forget. Every winter she would take her toll, every damp season she would audit my account, after every exposure or fatigue she would lightly tap some shrinking nerve and whisper "Remember!" A passion ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... the first yelp of the outburst with which he had stormed into the room. Probably there was not another man in the State who could have prevailed by sheer force of dignity and carriage in that moment when the passions of his opponents were so white-hot. But he was, in intellect, birth, breeding, and position, above them all, and they knew it. There, boxed in that little room, they faced him, and anger, rancor, spite, itch for revenge gave ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... are knit with sinews wrought of steel, They will not bend, they will not break, beneath the tyrant's heel; But in the white-hot flame of love, to silken cobwebs spun, They whirl the engines of the world, all keeping time ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... pair of young horses down Ludgate Hill on a greasy day at noon, with the whole road chock-a-block with traffic, lighting a pipe with a wooden match with one hand, carrying on an animated conversation with the other with a fare on the front seat, dropping white-hot satire on the heads of drivers less efficient than himself, and always getting the 'bus through safely with about an inch to spare on ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... this we have nothing to do. Whatever the uncertainty that afterwards arose as to the cause of the fire, there could be no uncertainty as to the fire itself at the time. It blazed and roared so furiously, that the inside of the house resembled a white-hot furnace. Flames spouted from the windows and chimneys, glaring fiercely on the spectators, who assembled rapidly from all quarters, as if defying them all, and daring the firemen to do their worst. Sparks enough to have shamed all the Roman candles ever made in or out of Rome were ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... the wasteful dissipation of heat. The spark made by a flint and steel, consists of a thin shaving of steel, scraped off by the flint and heated by the arrested motion. When well struck, the spark is white-hot and at that temperature it burns with bright scintillations in the air, just as iron that is merely red-hot burns in pure oxygen. This is the theory: ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... Wherever green grass had grown the spears now grew; and wherever the sand was it was a terrible trap of quicksand. She tried to dismount in a little pool, but fortunately for her she noticed in time that what shone in it so silvery was not water but white-hot molten metal. ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... daylight now. Rifle-smoke and clouds of dust and gray mist shot through with flashes of powder, and the awful rage, as if all the demons of Hell were crying vengeance, are all in that picture burned into my memory with a white-hot brand. And above all these there come back to me the faces of that little band of resolute men biding the moment when the command to charge should be given. Such determination and such splendid heroism, not twice in a lifetime is it vouchsafed ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the brilliant light is produced by a glowing filament of carbon. The powerful current of electricity experiences so much resistance as it flows through this badly conducting substance, that it raises the temperature of the carbon wire so as to make it dazzlingly white-hot. Indeed the carbon is thus elevated to a temperature far in excess of that which could be obtained in any other way. The reason why carbon is employed in the electric lamp, in preference to any other substance, may be ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... the old thorn which prodded them into risks and recklessness. Danger ahead on both paths. Don't risk trying to learn galactic secrets, but don't risk your enemy's learning them either. You held a white-hot iron in both hands in this business. And Ashe was right, they had stumbled on something here which hinted that a whole world had been altered to suit some plan. Suppose the secret of that alteration was discovered by ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... doctor seared his arm with a white- hot iron in an effort to do away with the pain of the neuralgia and years afterward Father would laugh about it—"just like African medicine man, driving out the devils in my arm with a white-hot iron—the trouble was not there, it was the poison in my system from faulty elimination." When at last he did discover the source of his ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... the house. Gower raked a flat rock, white-hot, out to the edge of the coals and put fat quahaugs on it to roast. Then he sat back ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... after the plunge, he heard certain dreadful cries which he never forgot as long as he lived. They were the death shrieks of his unhappy crew, imprisoned below among the bursting steam-pipes and boilers, the cascade of white-hot coals from the furnaces, and the crumpling wreckage of machinery and torn plates; and he knew that his trim little ship and his gallant comrades were gone from him ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... was her name, and her husband had been a glass blower. He earned good wages—five dollars a day in the busy season. But he worked in front of a huge tank of white-hot glass and that was hard on a man. And once on a hot day he had gone suddenly dizzy, and fallen upon a mass of hot slag, and been frightfully burned in the face. They had carried him to the hospital and taken out one eye. And then, because of his family and the end of ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... the sand blazed up. The desert was white-hot, with a silver whiteness hotter than gold, and the foreshortened shadows were turquoise blue. It was heaven to arrive at a miniature oasis, and see the open-fronted, awninged luncheon-tent reflected with its green frame of palms, in a clear lagoon, thoughtfully left by the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the calmness of white-hot iron, which is something like the calmness of despair. ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... was busy going over all the memories of the last three days. I tried hard, but in vain, to skip the black part, the thought of which made me flinch as if the branding-iron was white-hot against my cheek. Mentally I saw double—Jack's red blood with one eye and Margaret's amber hair with the other. As I rode I fought memory with memory, mingling gall and honey, now mumbling broken prayers and now singing snatches ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... mimic star. A sheet of dazzling light, which is called the electric arc, is seen to bridge the gap. It is not a true flame, for there is little combustion, but rather a nebulous blaze of silvery lustre in a bluish veil of heated air. The points of carbon are white-hot, and the positive is eaten away into a hollow or crater by the current, which violently tears its particles from their seat and whirls them into the fierce vortex of the arc. The negative remains pointed, but it is also worn away about half as fast as the positive. This wasting of the ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... followed; but after an hour of it one of those white-hot flashes of thought, such as only occur to the natural business genius, seared my mind and sent me post-haste to the ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... Fillipovsky,-white-faced, hollow-eyed and indignant. Below them the second siezd of the All-Russian Soviets boiled and swirled, and over their heads the Military Revolutionary Committee functioned white-hot, holding in its hands the threads of insurrection and striking with a long arm.... It was 10.40 ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... traveled over my pad with scarcely a rest. Then I went to the little room I had rented for two days, and there I cut it to half, and then mailed it, white-hot, to ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with, but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his inspiring address glowed like silver fresh ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... she meant and fled. For hours neither Mrs. Excell nor Maud spoke above a whisper. When the minister came down to tea he made no comment on Harry's absence. He had worn out his white-hot rage, but was not yet in full control ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... heavens a solid sphere revolving, with its stars, round the central fire; and the truth he discovered was mingled with so much mysticism, and confined to so small and retired a school, that it was quickly lost again. In the next generation Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a vast globe of white-hot iron, and that the stars were material bodies made white-hot by friction with the ether. A generation later the famous Democritus came nearer than any to the truth. The universe was composed of an infinite number of indestructible ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... her, and held him back where he must see her, and white-hot with passionate purpose, she kissed him. "Jim Cleve, if you've NERVE enough to be BAD you've nerve enough to save the girl who LOVES ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... the bewildered face of Sol Hanson—he took out the almost white-hot iron, tested it, hammered it and turned it, with the skill of a master-craftsman, heeding no one; all intent on his work. He chiselled it, he beat it, he turned it and holed it, then tempered the completed shoe, handing it over finally ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... forbidden pipes, had ensured him six hours' sleep, and a cooler skin; with the result that he had successfully induced an amused medical officer to report him 'fit for duty.' But Nature is relentless; and Lenox, driving back from 'orderly room' through a white-hot glare, and a haze of pungent dust, found himself speculating vaguely—as though the question concerned some unknown entity in another world—how he was going to drag a protesting body and brain through the rest of the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... witnessed the earnest work. The noble efforts of those Union men in their fierce struggle have never yet been appreciated. But they fought against great odds, and were inevitably overborne. The opposition was organized, ably led, and white-hot with zeal. The political power and the wealth of the South lay in the hands of the secessionists. The clergy threw their weight on that side, preaching that slavery, God's ordinance, was in danger. Union ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... but Ser Perth and the nurse leaped forward to hold him. The thing started to grow brighter. It shone now like a tiny bit of white-hot metal; but the older man touched it, and it snuggled down into Dave's chest, dimming its glow and somehow purring. Warmth seemed to flow from it into Dave. The two men watched for a moment, then picked up their apparatus and turned to go. The Sather Karf lifted the fire from the brazier in his ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... before in the dungeons of Naples. They had been spoken by the Inquisitors who came to Italy with one of the Spanish princes. Instantly he recalled the scene where first he had listened to them—the dungeon draped in black—the white-hot irons which had seared his flesh; the rack which had maimed his limbs, the masked men ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... position. It is nothing. His thick hide has merely been punctured by a flaming lance of wasp virility. Then a second and a third stallion, and all the stallions, begin to cavort on their forelegs over the precipitous landscape. Swat! A white-hot poniard penetrates my cheek. Swat again!! I am stabbed in the neck. I am bringing up the rear and getting more than my share. There is no retreat, and the plunging horses ahead, on a precarious trail, promise little safety. My horse overruns Charmian's horse, and that ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... almost religious pride in cooperating with them and in antagonizing their adversaries. They hated all the adversaries of the outlaws, whether landowners, constabulary or inspectors. But, above all, they loathed, abhorred, abominated and detested with a white-hot animosity any yeoman, peasant or slave who failed to do all in his power to foster the interests of the outlaws; regarding such persons, male or female, as traitors to the cause of the populace. Especially did they cherish an envenomed and malignant ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... white-hot road which climbed sharply to the northeast, we could scarcely restrain a shout of exultation. It was perfect weather. We rode good horses, we had chosen our companions, and before us lay a thousand miles ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... until the sun swung up like a white-hot metal ball in the sky, and the quivering heat drove them below under the awnings. From here they could still view the stranger, but not to so good advantage. The breeze, by good fortune lasted till deep in the morning, but finally dropped down in the blanketing heat, with the unknown craft ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... His Holiness, then, that first drew on Him the hostility of the world—that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity went clothed. Which of you convinceth me of sin?... Let him that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone at her! These were words that pierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke an undying hatred. ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... whispering together, and presently they called for buckets of fire. These were brought, full of glowing charcoal, and into them irons were thrust. The unhappy slaves saw what was in store for them, and pulled until their muscles cracked. Soon the irons were white-hot, and the chief driver called to us in Spanish: 'We must escape that cursed heretic-ship yonder. Now, you all see these irons? If I see one of you flagging in your efforts, that man will be branded with them, and when we get into ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood |
