"Seared" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoughts of every reasonable man. This odious conception, so blasphemous in its view of the Creator, arose from the exaggerations of Oriental phrases, and may perhaps have been of service in a coarse age where men were frightened by fires, as wild beasts are seared by the travellers. Hell as a permanent place does not exist. But the idea of punishment, of purifying chastisement, in fact of Purgatory, is justified by the reports from the other side. Without such punishment there could be no justice in the Universe, ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... disunited, Torn from every nearer tie, Seared in heart, and lone, and blighted, More than this I scarce ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... looked into the haggard face, into the scars of suffering that seared it, and she had answered gently: "Tomorrow you shall come to me ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... lighter and lighter. A hot wind rose, blowing direct into his face, flinging at him fine particles of burning sand that sifted through his clothing and got into his boots, torturing further his tortured feet; the wind seared his eyeballs and threatened to blind him. He lifted his head, selected a distant landmark, sought to shelter his eyes with the broad brim of ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... animals and children and by so doing annoyed the people very much. So one day when he was far away from water, they surrounded him and set the grass on fire on every side, so that he could not escape to the river without passing through the fire. The fire overtook him and scorched and seared his back, so that from that day his skin has been hard and scaly, and he no longer goes far from ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... Monsieur Laporte was reading from the Epistle of Timothy a prophecy that there should come 'some who shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth,' who would advocate will-worship and their own good deeds in opposition to the all perfect atonement ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... the winds sighing from leagues of forest over the red roofs in the moonlight; he heard the Brothers' voices talking of the things beyond this life as though they had actually experienced them in the body; and, as he sat in the jolting train, a spirit of unutterable longing passed over his seared and tired soul, stirring in the depths of him a sea of emotions that he thought had ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... a hot, windless day in London, in early September. Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court was already seared and a little shrivelled. The privet hedges were almost black green; and the mould in the dismal borders that they screened looked as though it had never known rain or hose water and as if it could no more ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the misshapen features to flicker and melt grotesquely. Then the light shone clear again and he saw the broken, twisted nose; and the eyes that stared obstinately from their split lids; and the gaping, grinning mouth that, years ago, the torturers had cut wide upon each seared and tattooed cheek; and the swollen, split lips that could not hide where once had been a tongue. He passed his hand along the shroud and lightly touched the ugly hump where the spine had been pressed and snapped, and the slanted shoulders and the twisted hips and legs. "Thou ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... where first they had met in this their present home, and looked out beyond the tumbled shore ice to the steel-gray, angry waters. The wind pricked their faces, and, going home, the sleigh-bells jingled, the snowballs from the horses' hoofs hit against the dash, the cold air seared the inside of their nostrils. When Orde helped Carroll from beneath the warm buffalo robes, she held up to him a face glowing with colour, framed in the soft fluffy fur of ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... seemed the result of some evil witchcraft; her blood chilled. Yet, with renewed eagerness, she turned the combination. She did not need to refer to the letter, she knew it by heart—the numbers were seared there. The heavy door swung outward. Within she saw well-remembered cases of velvet and morocco. This contained her mother's diamond collar; that her lavalliere; the emerald pendant was in the box of ivory velvet; the earrings ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... man lay face upward, his feet inside the hallway, one side of his head crushed in. He was roughly dressed in woolen shirt and patched smallclothes, and wore gold hoops in his ears, his complexion dark enough for a mulatto, with hands seared and twisted. Surely the fellow was no soldier; he appeared more to me like one who had followed the sea. I stepped over his body, and glanced the length of the hall. The chandelier was shattered, the glass gleaming ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... the sun had seared and the mischief its fiery beams had played with the coat he was so proud of, he flew into a great passion, and berated the sun in a terrible way for a little boy no higher than a man's knee, and he ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... Bupp, I had time to tell myself. Be glad for a mechanical mind. Where do you lift four thousand pounds of car aimed right at you? Well, there is a small valve, can't weigh half an ounce, lightly spring-loaded, that is in the power-steering mechanism. I seared a lift at it. ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... beyond them moaned the sea with never shore nor island so far as the eye could reach. Among the green fields lay a village, and on this village the eyes of the King and his armies were turned as they came down the slope. It lay beneath them, grave with seared antiquity, with old-world gables stained and bent by the lapse of frequent years, with all its chimneys awry. Its roofs were tiled with antique stones covered over deep with moss, each little window ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... swayed from its summit, partitions were falling, platforms giving way, and hundreds of air ships caught by the sheets of fire were crumpling and falling in swooping curves like birds whose wings had been seared. I was thankful that we could not see the unfortunates who were perishing in that furnace. It was but too evident that not a soul on ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... nails deep, Silently, coolly. The house was asleep, I hung for three years, forbidden to die. I seemed but a shadow the servants passed by. At the end of the time with hot irons he returned. "The Quitter Sublime" on my bosom he burned. As he seared me he hissed: "You are wearing away. The good angels tell me you leave them today. You want to come down from the nails in the door. The victor must hang there three hundred years more. If any prig-saint would outvote all mankind He must use an immortally resolute mind. Think what the saints ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... remember, as its builder remembered, the stars that ascend and fall in the great arch of the sky: and I believe that stars, and boughs, and leaves, and bright colors are everlastingly lovely, and to be by all men beloved; and, moreover, that church walls grimly seared with squared lines, are not better nor nobler things than these. I believe the man who designed and the men who delighted in that archivolt to have been wise, happy, and holy. Let the reader look ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... other means of venting his rage and disappointment. The other men took the matter very coolly. It appeared to me that their minds were too dull and brutalised, and their hearts too callous, to comprehend their awful position. Seared in their consciences, they were truly given over to a reprobate mind. The two men who had been gained over by Delano to assist him we sent on board the brig, exchanging them for two who could be relied on; ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... be self-pity and that is always degrading. With uncertain hands she tried to transform that pity into sorrow, not for herself, but for him. The burnt offering seared her. In the secret chambers of her being her young soul tripped and fell. For support she clutched at her creed. Ordinarily it would have sustained her. Ordinarily it would have told her that her suffering was the penalty for suffering which she had ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... with thy melilot, and tear off the callus of thy mind, as that may flay the leather from thy back, and as thy epispastics may strip the parchment from thy plotting head? If not, then indeed is thy conscience seared, and no hopes ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... everything, were new to me. I couldn't understand. Then I cursed myself. I swore to God that I wouldn't become the thing I am. But He didn't help me; and I couldn't help myself. I tried! Ah, how I tried! But there was something—her eyes, it was—eyes that burnt and seared!—I tried to kill myself, as Parmalee did. I couldn't.... And the only forgetfulness lay in drink—drink that sapped my strength and drained my veins and shrivelled my brain. Tell me it's a dream, Tom—that it's all but a vile, horrible, grewsome dream! Tell me that I'm the kind ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... giving it to two of her women, bade them pull at it. They did so, and I swooned away and was for excess of pain in a world other than this. Then she came with a steel scalpel and cut off my yard, so that I remained like a woman: after which she seared the wound with the boiling oil and rubbed it with a powder, and I the while unconscious. When I came to myself, the blood had ceased to flow; so she bade the damsels unbind me and gave me a cup of wine to drink. Then said she to me, "Go now to her whom thou hast married and who grudged me a single ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of his pupils, reacting from the shock, received and secreted the azure overflow. His fringed eyelids darkened, and drooped. His mouth, which had been stiffened and seared with bitter lines, was the first to recover, and smiled, while his eyes still seemed full of pain, like the eyes of a good-looking martyr whose body bristles ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... After three terrible years of unprecedented warfare, during which they had performed the impossible, they did not want a fresh army to come along and steal their glory by administering a final blow to a tottering enemy. Gazing into those strange, seared faces, beginning to see behind the iron mask, Dorn learned the one thing a soldier lives, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... which Sydney Baxter had entered some few months previously, was now a heap of ruins. The whole country was desolate: the once picturesque roads lined by trees were now but a line of shell holes, with here and there leafless, branchless stumps, seared guardians of the thousand graves. On June 7th, 1915, ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... and dragged to the corral, where they were flung and the brand seared on their flanks with long irons taken from a fire ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... to say more, for the officer, drawing a pistol, snapped it at his lordship; as at the same moment Father Holt, drawing a pistol, shot the officer through the head. It was done, and the man dead in an instant of time. The orderly, gazing at the officer, looked seared for a moment, and ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... absence. Her demand under such circumstances could not fail to prove successful; and it was conceded by Louis himself with the greater alacrity that her presence as a prisoner in the Louvre was irksome and painful to a youth whose conscience was not yet totally seared; and who professed, even while exposing her from hour to hour to the insults of his hirelings, to feel towards her "all the sentiments ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... spring, Is the unfolding of Love's happy morn! Then our nurst hopes, anticipating, bring The May-day breaking, that shall bear no thorn: The thorn must have its birth-day with the rose— When one is blighted, still the other grows, And grows the keener, as the seared leaves fall, And rankles in the heart when the storm ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean! The child carried away in the twinkling of an eye—the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted; the aged sire, cut down like a shock of corn in its season, falling withered and seared like the leaves of autumn; the young exulting in the prime of manhood; the pious and benevolent, the great and good, succumbing indiscriminately to the same inexorable decree; the erring and thoughtless, reckless of all warning, hurried away in the midst ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... come the memory of Nellie—dear, frank-eyed, open-hearted Nellie Tanner—and the thought that her fresh wholesomeness was pledged to make glad the life of Nat Burns seared his heart. A cloud settled down on his brow. But in a moment he recalled himself. His hostess had asked him a ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... that brutal man, familiar with every form of cruelty? To answer this, we must carry the reader backward in his history. Hard and reprobate as the godless man seemed now, there had been a time when he had been rocked on the bosom of a mother,—cradled with prayers and pious hymns,—his now seared brow bedewed with the waters of holy baptism. In early childhood, a fair-haired woman had led him, at the sound of Sabbath bell, to worship and to pray. Far in New England that mother had trained her only son, with long, unwearied ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... back to watch the effect on the aged inventor. Could it be that Brent was lying? Or was it fear? Could it be that at last his seared conscience was troubling him? ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... Winter said: 'You have not been here lately; sit down.' The Rabbit said he came because his grandmother had altogether beaten the life out of him" (the fallen dbris?). "The Winter went hunting. It was very cold: there was a snow-storm. The Rabbit seared up a deer. 'Shoot him,' said the Rabbit. 'No; I do not hunt such things as that,' said the Winter. They came upon some men. That was the Winter's game. He killed the men and boiled them for supper," (cave-cannibalism). "The Rabbit refused to ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... of the message on the board still seemed to attract him, for, without heeding the other's words, he glanced over at the seared tree-trunk ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... at the end of the table, whose nobly cut face was seared with lines of physical pain endured and outlived, withdrew a very small pipe from his ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... criminal had more warning than Shepherd of his approaching miserable fate, if he would have suffered anything to have deterred him; but alas! what are advices, terrors, what even the sight of death itself, to souls hardened in sin and consciences so seared as his. He had, when taken up and carried before Col. Ellis, been committed to New Prison for a capital offence. He had not remained there long before he wrote the Colonel a letter in which (provided he were admitted an evidence) he offered ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... his crew were soon busy supplying remedies for burns, since several of the men were seared by the flames. Then, as it was learned they had eaten nothing for many hours, it having been impossible to use the galley, a meal was prepared and the survivors of the ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... certain times in a young man's life when through great sorrow or sin all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... that gray-green land he would bury the man and the soul that reached upward in him with pleasant ambitions, to become a creature over sheep. Just a step higher than the sheep themselves, wind-buffeted, cold-cursed, seared and blistered and hardened like a callous through which the urging call of a man's duty among men could ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... frequently used to express the solitary prowess of this extraordinary man in resisting the multiplied, wily, and envenomed attacks of his opponents; and he realized the fable to the full—he not merely crushed the heads, but he seared them. He extinguished that principle of evil increase, by which all the efforts of foreign governments had been baffled in their contests with Jacobinism; and in the midst of an empire at all times inclined to look with jealousy on power, and at that moment nervous for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... had I felt the shame of my ignoble trade, but never so acutely as at that moment. It had seared my soul when Giovanni Sforza had told my story to his Court, ere he had driven me from Pesaro with threats of hanging, and it had burned even deeper when later, Madonna Lucrezia, upon entrusting me with her letter to her brother, had upbraided me with the supineness that ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... all the drama of death that seared one's soul as an onlooker; the frightful sum of sacrifice that we were recording day by day. There were times when it became intolerable and agonizing, and when I at least desired peace-at-almost-any-price, peace by negotiation, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Good Indian stood and looked on with lips as tightly drawn as the other's, he seared a circle around the wound—a circle which bit deep and drew apart the gashes like lips opened for protest. He regarded critically his handiwork, muttered a "Bueno" under his breath, knocked the ashes from his pipe, ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Conscience may be seared; may be ignored; may be trampled on, but it cannot be killed; it cannot even be weakened and is ever ready at the most unseasonable and unexpected times to start up, vigorous and faithful to the very end, with its emphatic "Don't!" ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... man and cut off his thumbs, and were deaf to his pitiful cries, And they seared the stumps, and they viewed their work through happy and dazzled eyes. "How trim he appears," the horse exclaimed, "since his awkward thumbs are gone! For the life of me I cannot see why the ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... city. He also began to build the famous Tower of Babel, but circumstances over which he had no control put it out of his power to finish it. He ran it up eight stories high, however, and two of them still stand, at this day—a colossal mass of brickwork, rent down the centre by earthquakes, and seared and vitrified by the lightnings of an angry God. But the vast ruin will still stand for ages, to shame the puny labors of these modern generations of men. Its huge compartments are tenanted by owls and lions, and old Nimrod lies neglected ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... grave-cloth; and Carlo Formaggia, the approved bravo—oiled and jaunty, with his brown felt fantastically rolled and stuck over one ear, with a long cigar which he alternately gnawed and sucked, Carlo the broad-chested, of the seared, evil face, came down with the stream on the arms of two other gilded youths. They met before the cafe, the man of intolerable wrongs and the Pilia-Borsa of Siena. Maso scowled till his thick eyebrows cut his face horizontally in two. He stood ostentatiously still, muttering with his lips ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... it is not worth while to fight me; that I have no real weapons at my command?" and her eyes shot forth a flame that devoured my rising hopes and seared my heart as with ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... little girl, with the necklace of blue glass beads, sitting by her; she is being brought up to 'the profession.' Pantomime is to be her line, and she is coming out to-night, in a hornpipe after the tragedy. The short thin man beside Mr. St. Julien, whose white face is so deeply seared with the small-pox, and whose dirty shirt-front is inlaid with open-work, and embossed with coral studs like ladybirds, is the low comedian and comic singer of the establishment. The remainder of the audience—a tolerably numerous one by ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... before her heart was bowed; None higher than he who heard Medea's keen last word Transpierce her traitor, and like a rushing cloud That sundering shows a star Saw pass her thunderous car And a face whiter and deadlier than a shroud That lightened from it, and the brand Of tender blood that falling seared his suppliant hand. ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... murderous neglect!! Mankind often vainly attempts to atone for unkindness or cruelty to the living, by honoring the same after death; but John Ardinburgh undoubtably meant his pot of paint and jug of whisky should act as an opiate on his slaves, rather than on his own seared conscience. ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... fills the place of Shakespeare's music. Time has tessellated the surface of the canvas; but beauty, intangible and immortal, dwells in its depths safely—dwells there even as it dwells in the works of Shakespeare, though the folios be foxed and seared. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to my heart as the museum of which I have been a director now these many years? Am I a madman, or a destroyer of youth? I love the young. This inhuman death of one so fair and innocent has whitened my locks and seared my very heart-strings. I shall never get over it; and whatever evidence you may have or think you have, of my having handled bow and arrow in that museum gallery, it must fall before the fact of my natural incapability to do the thing with which you have ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... of commination. His scheme succeeded; for great was the sale of these hymns and ballads at a halfpenny a piece in the streets of Glamerton. Even those who bought to laugh, could not help feeling an occasional anticipatory sting of which, being sermon-seared, they were ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... in. "Very good. I'm the goat. Lying, hypocrisy, false pretense, fake charity; it's all one to a sin-seared old reprobate like me. After it's over I'll go around the corner and steal what pennies I can find in Blind Simon's cup, just to make me feel comparatively ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... through the Fifty-ninth Street end of the Park, looking strangely seared and bereft from the first blight of the frost, he turned to her again. This time his tone was as serious ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... pursued her were forward and solicitous. There was something of sacrilege about it all. The minds and souls of real women—such were not matters for American story; and yet the Americans wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient, who worshipped the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence seared, calcined.... Only here and there was a bit of real literature—usually by a woman. The men seemed hung up to dry at twenty-five. There was no manhood ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... for some time in silence, and for the first time in that savage nature, all instinct and appetite, there awoke a mysterious, a tender emotion. His heart, that seared and hardened heart, unmoved when the convict's cudgel or the heavy whip of the watchman fell on his shoulders, beat oppressively. In that sight he saw again his infancy; and closing his eyes sadly, the prey to torturing regret, he walked ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... clearness, or it may be neglected and opposed, and all but crushed. The thought of God is natural to man, the thought of right and wrong is natural to man—and yet there may be atheists who have blinded their eyes, and there may be degraded and almost animal natures who have seared their consciences and called sweet bitter and evil good. Thus men may so plunge themselves into the present as to lose the consciousness of the eternal—as a man swept over Niagara, blinded by the spray and deafened by the rush, would ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the young fugitive and he questioned him closely. He saw that ill-fortune had already seared his heart, that scorn and disgrace had overthrown his courage, and that his pride, transformed into bitterness and spite, led him to see nothing in the harshness and injustice of men but their evil disposition and the vanity of all virtue. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... to have his hand enclosed and seared in a tube of red-hot iron, to have his arms, legs, and thighs torn to pieces with burning pincers, his bowels to be quartered, his heart to be torn out and thrown into his face, his head to be dissevered from his trunk and placed on a pike, his body to ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... pain of imagined torture to obey or to speak, this brute not only cursed me with abandon, he deliberately spat upon me. I was a mental incompetent, but like many others in a similar position I was both by antecedents and by training a gentleman. Vitriol could not have seared my flesh more deeply than the venom of this human viper stung my soul! Yet, as I was rendered speechless by delusions, I could offer not so much as a word of protest. I trust that it is not now too late, however, to protest ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... silent. How long could we wait? How long could people live?... I looked at Seraphina. How long could she live?... The thought seared my heart like a hot iron. I wrung my ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... sway; Then to the neighbouring forest led the way. On the lone island's utmost verge there stood Of poplars, pines, and firs, a lofty wood, Whose leafless summits to the skies aspire, Scorched by the sun, or seared by heavenly fire (Already dried). These pointing out to view, The nymph just showed him, ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... sad seared face, I weary of seeing thee, And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace, ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... conspiracy of Marcantonio Frangipani, which caused her removal to the nunnery immediately outside the town. A long ride up the desolate Apennine valleys, bleak beyond words just now with their thin fringe of oak scrub turned russet, thin patches of grass seared by the frost, the last few yellow leaves of the poplars by the torrents shaking and fluttering about in the chill Tramontana; the mountaintops are wrapped in thick grey cloud; tomorrow, if the wind continues, we shall see them round masses of snow against the cold ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... said, still calmly, though a deep flush stained her cheek. Herbert had spoken playfully, but there was that in his words which, to a heart seared as was hers, was productive of ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... four successive days, near the summit of the pass on the western slope, mercury froze at noon. [Footnote: We had only a mercurial thermometer, so that we did not know how much below -39 deg. the temperature was.] The faintest breath of air seared the face like a hot iron; beards became tangled masses of frosty wire; eyelids grew heavy with long snowy fringes which half obscured the sight; and only the most vigorous exercise would force the blood back into the benumbed extremities from which it ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... only of an uncompleted task. Gone was the glamour and the promise and the good comradeship. He had taken them all. She faced to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow empty-handed—in her heart the memory of words that had seared and healed in a breath, and the dead dream of a kiss. Her throat ached with ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... small but beautiful forests of pine. Back and forth in all parts of this vast region the Navaho drive their flocks. At the season when the slight rainfall produces even scant pasturage on the desert plains the flocks are pastured there; but as the grass becomes seared by the summer sun and exhausted from pasturing, the flocks are taken into the mountains, where the shade of the pines lends grateful coolness. Again, as the deep snows of winter come, the sheep and goats are driven ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... came to the assistance of the Hydra and commenced biting the feet of her assailant. Heracles destroyed this new adversary with his club, and now called upon his nephew to come to his aid. At his command Iolaus set fire to the neighbouring trees, {240} and, with a burning branch, seared the necks of the monster as Heracles cut them off, thus effectually preventing the growth of more. Heracles next struck off the immortal head, which he buried by the road-side, and placed over it a heavy stone. Into the poisonous blood of the monster he then dipped his arrows, which ever afterwards ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... with their backs to the fire and, taking up the young man's wet clothes, which the settler had brought out under his arm and thrown on a stool, arranged them over the backs of chairs and the stool to dry. He lost some of his nervousness or seared manner under the influence of the gin, and answered one or two questions with reference to ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... wool, come drifting noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a story to be told here, except in bare epitome. A truce was patched up between the contending parties. Bread flowed again into Paris. The seared and hungry people grew courageous and violent again when their appetites were satisfied. When M. Mole and his fellows returned to Paris with a treaty of peace which they had signed, the populace gathered round them ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... structures—featureless, squat, forbidding heptagons of dull green metal. No thing living was to be seen in that space. Its pavement was of solid metal and immensely thick, and that metal, as well as that of the walls, was burned and blackened and seared as though by numberless exposures to intolerable flame. In a lower compartment of one of these enormous heptagons Vortel Kromodeor, First Projector Officer, rested before a gigantic and complex instrument board. He was at ease—his huge wings ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... I leave thee, each fond look expresses, Ye high rocky summits, ye ivy'd recesses! How long must I leave thee, thou wood-shaded river, The echoes all sigh—as they whisper—for ever! Tho' the autumn winds rave, and the seared leaves fall, And winter hangs out her cold icy pall— Yet the footsteps of spring again ye will see, And the singing of birds—but ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... I had dreamed of history's reward, And when ambition seared my soul—How hard, To be content with praise ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... the young man, supporting himself on his two elbows, drew close to Aramis' face, with such an expression of dignity, of self-command, and of defiance even, that the bishop felt the electricity of enthusiasm strike in devouring flashes from that seared heart of his, into ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... who wrote that was sincere enough," said Tom, as he passed the letter over to his chum. "However, I don't like to feel that I can be seared by any man who's too cowardly to sign his name to ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... hear it. A bolt of jagged lightning seared through his brain. The limp hands of the driver fell away from the reins and he fell to the ground, crumpling as a dry leaf that is ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... swamping of her equanimity. She never lost for a moment the image of superiority that should be her perfect example, the non-assertion that was the way of heaven; but her comprehension was like a figure ruthlessly dragged about by an overpowering unreflective force. A sharp hatred of Nettie Vollar seared her mind and perished in ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... entertaining; he had travelled a great deal, and was full of anecdote; and being naturally lively and garrulous, the design he entertained of taking away the life of his charge did not prevent his making himself agreeable to her in the meantime. With his well-seared conscience, he neither felt nervous nor saturnine at the prospect of what was before him—why should he indeed?—for the only part of the prospect he fixed his eye upon was the gain; the little operation by means of which it was to be acquired, ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... one, swinging the flaring hose in a slow arc as I advanced. The creature lunged at me and threshed at the burning jet with all four of its feelers. But it had been exposed to the air for a long time now. The ghastly tentacles were dry; withered and soft. A touch of the fire seared them unmercifully. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... melancholy exaltation in the presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others, or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold—who may stand as a type of all his heroes—has run "through sin's labyrinth" and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to roam, "the wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a capacity ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... woman the rightful owner of the property he was himself enjoying, in a prison he had made for her in her own house, then he was villain enough to strangle the one who had discovered this fact, were she the cherished darling of his seared and calculating heart. I was afraid of him now that I knew him, yet I never thought of flying his presence or revealing his crime. He was, villain or no villain, my husband, and nothing could ever undo that fact or make it true that ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... near now. The roar of it was like that of a great cataract, with now and then a louder crash of falling trees. The air was filled with ash and burning sparks, and twice Kazan drew forth his head to snap at blazing embers that fell upon and seared him ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... and would not be comforted. Her purist's pride was wounded; her prudish maiden's modesty was outraged—that her own father should believe it of her! And she must not open the subject or try to alter his opinion, for fear of the ridicule which seared her ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... have seen that Pizarro was required by the Crown to bring out a certain number of these holy men in his own vessels; and every succeeding vessel brought an additional reinforcement of ecclesiastics. They were not all like the Bishop of Cuzco, with hearts so seared by fanaticism as to be closed against sympathy with the unfortunate natives.8 They were, many of them, men of singular humility, who followed in the track of the conqueror to scatter the seeds of spiritual truth, and, with ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... scald. Alone of our House, he had the gift of the Dane in the flow of fierce song, and for him things lifeless had being. Stately tree, from which all the birds of heaven sent their carol; where the falcon took roost, whence the mavis flew forth in its glee,—how art thou blasted and seared, bough and core!—smit by the lightning ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... they were coming, gaunt and ghastly, sad and slow; They were coming, all the crimson wrecks of pride; With faces seared, and cheeks red smeared, and haunting eyes of woe, And clotted holes the khaki couldn't hide. Oh, the clammy brow of anguish! the livid, foam-flecked lips! The reeling ranks of ruin swept along! The limb that trailed, the hand that failed, the bloody finger tips! And ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... guarded against. Many trail herds had met disaster and been scattered to the four winds with nothing but a road brand to identify them afterward. The cattle were changing owners, and custom decreed that an abstract of title should be indelibly seared on their sides. The first guard, Jake Blair, Morg Tussler, and Clay Zilligan, were detailed to cut and drive the squads into the chute. These three were the only mounted men, the others being placed so as to facilitate the work. Cattle ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... all the dramatic genius of Greece and England— there was too much tragedy in the shape of gross reality, almost daily before their eyes. The amphitheatre extinguished the theatre. How was it possible that the fine and intellectual griefs of the drama should win their way to hearts seared and rendered callous by the continual exhibition of scenes the most hideous, in which human blood was poured out like water, and a human life sacrificed at any moment either to caprice in the populace, or to a strife of rivalry ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... with bushes of a year's growth, see how the silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of the summer ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... of alarm, which he banished as unworthy. Finally toward night he went down to the post office where he found several letters. One seared his consciousness; ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... suppose that she would consent to bring back into her mother's life the same tragic conflict, in new form, which had already rent and seared it, was madness. He read his dismissal in her quiet avoidance of him ever since she had been a witness of her mother's ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her leg to keep it from being jammed. Up went the bronco again before Wild Rose could find the stirrup. She knew she was gone, felt herself shooting forward. She struck the ground close to the horse's hoofs. Wild Fire lunged at her. A bolt of pain like a red-hot iron seared ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... struck at the savage arm with all his might, deflecting the blade just in time. It seared my shoulder like a red hot iron, and in the next instant all three of us were a rolling, kicking, snarling trio of animals. We fought desperately in the dark. There were no rules of the game. Biting, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... rolled around for a minute and then she went down. Say, Colonel, were you ever on a sinking ship? We got sucked right in with her. I thought we never would come up. I got out first, and I didn't see Beany, and Gee! I was never so seared in my life. I was just thinking about diving for him when he popped up all out of breath, same as I was. We had to float awhile, we were so used up. Then we happened to look up. We hadn't said a word yet, and there was that submarine. ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... his pride, and neither to his indolence,—that did not talk of his ancestry, proffer his hospitality, and defy me to an argument. I was a civilian,—they had no hostility to me,—but the blue-coats of the soldiers seared their eyeballs. In some cases their daughters remained upon the property; but the sons and the negroes always fled,—though in contrary directions. The old men used to peep through the windows at the passing columns; ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... who wrote that was sincere enough," said Tom, as he passed the letter over to his chum. "However, I don't like to feel that I can be seared by any man who's too cowardly to sign his ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... happy, after all their fears, Were those old Lusian mariners Who hailed that land the first, Upon whose seared and aching eyes, With an enrapturing surprise, Its ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... celebrate the birth of the republic wander freely through the halls and avenues, and into the most sacred rooms of the king.... There are ruins on every side in Paris," she says; "ruins of the Commune, or the Siege, or the Revolution; it is terrible—it seems as if the city were seared with ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... us! Began in fear and weakness, and in much trembling. May the power be of God." Soon after, he narrates the following scene:—"Entered the house of ——. Heard her swearing as I came up the stair. Found her storming at three little grandchildren, whom her daughter had left with her. She is a seared, hard-hearted wretch. Read Ezekiel 33. Interrupted by the entrance of her second daughter, furiously demanding her marriage lines. Became more discreet. Promised to come back—never came. Her father-in-law entered, a hideous spectacle of an aged drunkard, demanding money. ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... "as the lightning which shattered yonder oak hath softened its trunk. No; the seared wood is the fitter for the use of the workmen—the hardened and the dried-up heart is that which can best bear the task imposed by these dismal times. God and man will no longer endure the unbridled profligacy of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Discourse on Witchcraft, 1689, his Late Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, 1684, and his Wonders of the Invisible World, 1692; and enough references have been made to this literature of delusion, to the precedents that seared the consciences of courts and juries in their sentences of men, women, and children to death by the rack, the wheel, the ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... this gentleman, hate meant hate,—in the solid oriental sense. I should hardly have been surprised if the mere utterance of the words had seared ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... chatter of gossiping women; and above and through and below it all the cracking of the cabman's whip—that sceptre of the Roman cabby, that wand which is one part whip and nine parts crack. Sometimes it seemed to Mary Gowd that her brain was seared and welted by the pistol-shot reports ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... cowered, alarmed by what a quick glimpse of his face had shown her. She had never seen a human face so—not whitened by his fear, but greyed—greyed as if seared with fire and turned to carven ashes. She could tell, by that, that he would never, really, forgive her. Too firmly had his hopes been fixed upon the plans which he had built in many long hours of reflections going back along the years, no doubt, to that far ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... such scenes, then we need describe no further. If you have not, then you had not better hear the tale of woe. Imagine to yourselves a bar-room with all its sots, and their number multiplied indefinitely, while conscience-seared and bloated fiends stand behind the bar, from whence they deal out death and damnation, and the picture is complete. One has just arrived from earth. He is yet uninitiated in the mysteries and miseries of those which, like hungry lions, await him. He died ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... open everywhere in gaping cracks that intersected and made patterns in the garden like a crazy quilt. The gray-coated leaves hung motionless from the shriveling twigs, limp and discouraged. Horses lifted their seared feet wearily from the sizzling, yielding asphalt; dogs panted by with their tongues hanging out; pedestrians closed their eyes to shut out the merciless glare from the sidewalks. The streets were almost ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... porous rock everywhere. This denuded landscape! Cracked and scarred and tumbled, as though some inexorable Titan torch had seared and crumbled and broken it, left it now congealed like a wind-lashed sea ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... of thy queenly disdain, Thou art seared by my passion and pain; Thou shall hear me repeat till I die for it, Sweet, "I love thee! I dare ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... Hides his crown underneath an old shut in his bureau, 200 Breaks off in his brags to a suckle o' merry kings, How he often hed hided young native Amerrikins, An' turnin' quite faint in the midst of his fooleries, Sneaks down stairs to bolt the front door o' the Tooleries.[22] You say, 'We'd ha' seared 'em by growin' in peace, A plaguy sight more then by bobberies like these'? Who is it dares say thet our naytional eagle Won't much longer be classed with the birds thet air regal, Coz theirn be hooked ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... deluge, rushed the cold November rain; But the wind about him whistled, and the tempest swept in vain. What to him was wind or tempest, when his brain was seared with flame? What to him was earth or heaven, when his soul was sick ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... no conscious design in running; his muscles merely reacted in obedience to the grinding tumult in his brain. His eardrums rang with the fancied sound of Natalie's cries; and his eyeballs were seared with the picture of her shrinking in the brutal hands of Grylls. As he crashed through the wood, the little branches whipped his face unmercifully; and the spiny shoots of the jackpines tore his clothes. He ran full tilt into unyielding obstacles; ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... back!" cried Dick, and caught Caven by the arm. But with a jerk the seared boy freed himself and ran down the road at the top ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... which had already been suggested. I glanced about hastily. If anyone in his little audience was guilty, no one betrayed it, for all were following him, fascinated. Yet in the wildly throbbing brain of some one of them the guilty knowledge must be seared indelibly. Would the mere accusation be enough to dissociate the truth from, that brain or would Kennedy have to resort to ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve |
