"Searing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 one to his ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... 9. SEARING THE SOCIAL AFFECTIONS.—He has seared his social affections so deeply, so thoroughly, so effectually, that when, at last, he wishes to marry, he is incapable of loving. He marries, but is necessarily cold-hearted towards his wife, which ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... forms of phantasm, rising higher, flattening, reaching across space the arches of their spans, rendering unreal a world of beauty and dread. That in the old days was the deliberate fashion the desert had of searing men's souls with her majesty. Slowly, slowly, the changes melted one into the other; massively, deliberately the face of the world was altered; so that at last the poor plodding human being, hot, dry, blinded, ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... 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
... however gratifying this fact might be to his pride, it was in some ways a thorny discovery, since he dared not visibly pay his attentions to either. For his part he returned Hilda von Holtzhausen's devotion to a degree that surprised himself; his passion for her burnt him like a fire, utterly searing away the traces of his former affection for Maria Lee. Under these circumstances, most young men of twenty-one would have thrown prudence to the winds and acknowledged, either by acts or words, the object of their love; but not so Philip, who even at that age was ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... and again, until its significance was, so to speak, forced upon her; then the letter dropped from her hand, her arms fell limply to her sides, and she looked straight before her in a dazed, benumbed fashion, every word burning itself upon her brain and searing her heart. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... adept at "going through" a man; and while in the present instance it required but a few moments to satisfy myself that Maillot could not have the gem, I was all the while acutely sensible of a little foot tapping nervously beneath the table and an angry look searing my offending back. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... say, do, but from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body shot through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush. He was aghast at the unsuspected possibility revealed, as it were, out of a profound dark by the searing flash of his anger, cold at the thought of such absolute self-betrayal. Howat saw in fancy the bald triumph of a society to which his act consummated would have delivered him; a society that, as his ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... entered the doorway and looked upon them. They were six in number, evil-eyed men of Ethiopia, and seated in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay the waxen image of a man, and they were cutting it with knives and searing it with needles of iron and pincers made red-hot, and many instruments strange and dreadful to look upon. For these were the tormentors, and they spoke of those pains that to-morrow they should wreak upon ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... in her mind, a tangible searing hell alive with flame and devils, a sea of liquid fire, an ocean of boiling pitch, Satan commanding in the midst, and a myriad of ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... illusions about men. She had never known the tragedy of setting forth a dinner only to have hurled at her that hateful speech beginning with, "I had that for lunch." She had never seen a male, collarless, bellowing about the house for his laundry. She had never beheld that soul-searing sight—a man in his trousers and shirt, his suspenders dangling, his face lathered, engaged in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of a spirit Bowed from its wild pride into shame O yearning heart! I did inherit Thy withering portion with the fame, The searing glory which hath shone Amid the Jewels of my throne, Halo of Hell! and with a pain Not Hell shall make me fear again— O craving heart, for the lost flowers And sunshine of my summer hours! The undying voice of that dead time, With its interminable chime, Rings, in the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... breasts just where the heart was not, but near it, and how they had died hard, for they had lived more than half an hour with the knives in them, and at the last had been quartered alive. She had not believed what she had read, but now she knew that it was true. She envied them the searing, the tearing, and the knives which had at last killed them, though they had died ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... roughly for a time. He could still feel—and he recalled the sensation with great pleasure—the thick, slippery neck of the creature, and the way it had squirmed when he got his fingers into it. Yet the serpent evidently bore no malice. Or—a searing thought struck Laurie—having things his own way, he could afford to be generous. In other words, he was now perfecting his plans, while he, Laurie, was out of ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... was wrenched from him. There came a zigzag flash of lightning searing his brain, a crash that filled the world for him—and he floated ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... quieter or gentler than Millie Splay's utterance. But it was like a searing iron to the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... the North; but in the late presidential contest it was a strange weapon glittering in strong hands. Our society, diluted and weakened by the Southern element, revolted at first from the creed that is to prove its salvation. Not alone in our border States had the dragon crept, searing our fair institutions with his hot breath, but even upon the sturdy old Puritan stock were engrafted many of the petty notions that pass for 'principles' in Dixie. True, we were educated, all of us, into ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to fiery agony. His face was burning, the flames searing his flesh. He tried to reach a hand up to ease the pain and found the hand gripped firmly. He struggled, and Steve's voice said, "Take it easy, Rick. We'll ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... but in fine and far-reaching shape. His Opposite Number worked at it like a mule—a bewildered mule, beaten from behind, coaxed from in front, and propped on either soft side by Lord Lundie of the compressed mouth and the searing tongue. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... bite! Claw those wicked hands descending into your pure bed! Spring like spotless maiden aroused to find ravisher at her couch! Spring, Rose, spring! Squawking news of outrage to all the house, bound wildly, Rose, about this room that else you shall not see until through searing perils you have ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... the only one who could have held us together," sighed old Darrow, and his face looked as if a searing iron had passed over it. "This will put us ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... piano by the window, and forgetting all that had taken the place of his dream,—the searing flame of his manhood,—struck the gentle chords of that boyhood journey, something of the river and the meadow and the woods and the gray dawn, which had often sounded in his ears ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... attached. The road that he had been traveling led farther and farther down from what he loved most; it was irretrievably lost to him. He would never again be the centre of admiration and flattery. All that still bound him to his wife was the searing chain of jealousy. He never had been fond of his father; he hated his brother. He knew himself to be hated or, in his madness, believed himself to be hated. Little Annie would have clung to him with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... 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
... lights of youth no longer sparkled in their quiet depths, and time had not only "thinned her flowing hair"—necessitating caps—but had brushed the roses from her cheeks, and swept away, with his searing hand, the pale lilies from the furtive coverts whence they had glanced in tremulous beauty, in life's sweet prime; yet for all that, and a great deal more, Mrs. Burton, I have no manner of doubt, looked charmingly in the bright ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... pounds in the corn-sack when drawing forage and corn; to placate Troop Sergeants, the Troop Sergeant-Major and Squadron Sergeant-Major; to have a suit of mufti at some safe place outside and to escape from the branding searing scarlet occasionally; possibly even the terrible ambition to become an Officer's servant so as to have a suit of mufti as a right, and a chance of becoming Mess-Sergeant and then Quarter-Master, and perhaps of getting an Honorary Commission without doing a single parade or guard ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... in these hours, colossal, tragic; it needed this experience to bring out all there was of great and exceptional in his character. He was not of those who can quit the scene of their fruitless misery and find forgetfulness at a distance. Every searing stroke drove him more desperately in pursuit of his end. He was further from abandoning it, now that he knew another stood in his way, than he would have been if Emily had merely rejected him. He would not yield her to another man; he swore to himself that ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... fair Sylva. When she sees you in torment, she kisses me sweetly for der prifilege of stopping der heat-ray. I count upon you, my friend, to plead with her to grant me der most extrafagant of concessions, when der heat-ray is searing der flesh from your bones. I feel that she is soft-hearted enough ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and stiffness of my limbs) came softly to look upon him as he lay thus, his cares forgot awhile in blessed sleep; and thus, beneath his rags, I saw divers and many grievous scars of wounds old and new, the marks of hot and searing iron, of biting steel and cruel lash, and in joints, swollen and inflamed, I read the oft-repeated torture of the rack. And yet in these features, gaunt and haggard by suffering, furrowed and lined by pain, was a serene ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... 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 after ten years of continuous campaigning, it was with the ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson |
