"Seared" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villany often outreaches and tramples ingenuous nobility and helpless innocence. Some saintly spirits, victims of disease and penury, drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some bold minions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves of iron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems of society, and sweep through the world in pomp. The virtuous suffer undeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious. All ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... meet with, quite on a level with this learned baron in grovelling absurdity, upon whom "Jennet Preston would lay heavy at the time of his death," whether she had so lain upon Mr. Thomas Lister or not, if bigotry, habit, and custom did not render him seared and callous to ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... that I accuse myself, in that I, a man seared and lone at heart, presumed to come within the pale of human affections;—that I exposed myself to cross another's better and brighter hopes, or dared to soften my fate with the tender and endearing ties that are meet alone for a more genial and youthful nature;—if it please you that I ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... since we left Southampton, but the time seemed to have "stretched out to the crack of doom," and to have become eight weeks instead. So many dramatic incidents had been crowded into the last few days that the first four peaceful, uneventful days, marked by nothing that seared the memory, had faded almost out of recollection. It needed an effort to return to Southampton, Cherbourg and Queenstown, as though returning to some event of last year. I think we all realized that time may be ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... in a visit I made to Malmaison a short time subsequent to her death, which occurred soon after his first abdication. It was the place where they had lived together, before the imperial diadem had seared his brain; and it was the chosen spot of her retreat, when he, "the conqueror of kings, sank to the degradation of courting their alliance." The house was as she left it. Not a thing had been moved, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... joy. Know thou full clearly that thou in folly didst forsake the brightest of lights and the love of the Lord and that glorious faith, and that thou hast since dwelt in a 950 bath of fire, burdened with tortures and seared with flame, and that there, with hatred in thy soul, thou shalt ever suffer woe and misery ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... put away the words that she had heard. Never, so long as she lived, was she able to forget them. Like the flash of the shot itself, they leaped to her brain and seared themselves there. Years afterwards she could shut her eyes and fairly see those words burning ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... on. The form beside him sat so still that Mr. Stone ceased moving. His daughter was no longer sobbing. Suddenly her lips seared his forehead. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the county were more tardy in their welcome, and perhaps this is not very surprising, when one considers that they can scarcely have recovered from the terrible vengeance that seared all who had followed Monmouth only three ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... charity of darkness, he seemed ill at ease, and held himself from them, a marked figure, alone. A leprosy in himself tainted his every thought. He would not willingly come near any man. He understood English, unhappily now for him, and Boone's warning as they mounted seared like vitriol. "Look out, Harry, don't touch the filthy skut! It'll take the rotting of death to clean your fingers." After that, even Murguia drew ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... of black devils and ovens came upon him, and he saw himself thrust into flame. It seemed to him certain that his soul was lost—so certain, that the source of prayer died within him and he fell prostrate. He cursed, with curses that seared his soul as he uttered them, Harding, that cynical atheist, who had striven to undermine his faith, and he shrank from thought of ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... fatal apple; tear it up by the roots, though it be twisted with the chords of your life. Profit by the example of the miserable sinner that has passed from us, and embrace the means of grace while it is called to-day 'ere your conscience is seared as with a fire-brand, and your ears deafened like those of the adder, and your heart hardened like the nether mill-stone. Up, then, and be doing—wrestle and overcome; resist, and the enemy shall flee from you—Watch ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... go at noon day to the bottom of a deep pit,[8] we shall be able to see the stars which on the level ground are invisible. Even so, from the depths of grief—worn, wretched, seared, and dying—the blessed apparitions and tokens of heaven make themselves visible to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... met him daily. She had given her heart to him, yet she had learned little or nothing of the man within the man's frame. She had not even made his acquaintance. That had been proved to her one memorable morning upon the top of Bignor Hill, when humiliation had so deeply seared her soul that only during this last month had it been healed. In the great extremities of her life Henry Thresk had decided, not she, and he was a stranger to her. She beat her poor wings in vain against that ironic fact. Never had he done what she had ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... frosts had seared the beeches to a fiery red, and the berries were bright on the hawthorns, and the latest bloom of the heather had faded on hill and plain, and the happy pigs had devoured all the beech-nuts, Mr. Vawdrey and his wife came back ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... draft—all this history of discrimination and insult festered to make men think and willing to think that the venting of their unbridled anger against 12,000,000 humble, upstriving workers was a way of settling the industrial tangle of the ages. It was the logic of the broken plate, which, seared of old across its pattern, cracks never again, save ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... world, Salmasius had come short in personal abuse, for, as the initiator of the dispute, he had no personal antagonist. In denouncing the general herd of regicides and parricides he had hurt nobody in particular, while concentrating all Milton's lightnings on his own unlucky head. They seared and scathed a literary dictator whom jealous enemies had long sighed to behold insulted and humiliated, while surprise equalled delight at seeing the blow dealt from a quarter so utterly unexpected. There is no comparison between the invective of Milton and of Salmasius; not so much from Milton's ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... an incredibly short time. When a sudden or important emergency demanded the clansmen the chief slew a goat, and making a cross of light wood, seared its extremities with fire, and extinguished them in the blood of the animal. This was called the Fiery Cross, or Cross of Shame, because disobedience to what the symbol implied inferred infamy. It was delivered to a swift trusty runner, who with the utmost speed carried it to the ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... my brain was whirling madly, my head throbbed from my wound, while my face was bruised from colliding with the wall. I was so giddy that I could not stand erect, while my eyes burned and ached as if they had been seared with a red-hot iron. I fell upon the plank bed, but open flew the peep-hole and again rang out ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... time? Had they been placing mutual confidence in each other? No; they had not come to that yet. Linda still remembered the pang with which she had first heard of Gertrude's engagement, and Harry Norman had not yet been able to open his seared heart to ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... broke 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 respectable and ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his hands, it was folded about his mouth, it pounded violently upon his gallant heart, whilst the eye looked him between the eyes, so that his brain was seared as strive he might to turn away his head he kept his face turned ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... in hand, a laugh upon his lips; and a bolt of red fire entered into his side and seared him to the vitals. He fell; and the horse's tread jarred him and shook the world as it passed, spurred by its mail-clad rider with the ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... dark moment, Northwood felt himself seared by jealousy, for, through the plump, sweet flesh of Athalia's face, he saw the red blood leap again. How could she withhold herself from this ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... handfuls of 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 wonders ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... scarred and splintered. The 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
... flowers, the glittering dazzle of many lights, and the dainty frou-frou of silken skirts of wedding guests filing and tripping. So Miss Sophie stayed to the wedding, for what feminine heart, be it ever so old and seared, does not delight in one? And why shouldn't a poor little Creole old maid ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... all 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
... target. He knew it, his wife knew it; as yet the other woman but dimly suspected it—not being over subtle—and it smote me in the face continuously. The puppet always feels the most cut up at times like these. In a way, it is because his vanity is being seared. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... the 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 Lord ever ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... impervious scrubs, was such as to prevent me from either seeing much of the river during this day's journey, or pursuing a straight course. At one place I could only follow the grassy margin of the river, by passing between its channel and the berg, all seared as it was with water-worn gullies, and crowned with scrub; but I was soon locked up under these where a bad hole impeded our progress along the river, and I was obliged to back the carts out, the best way I could. ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... man who has suffered great bereavements in my time such as have seared my soul, since, perhaps because of my rather primitive and simple nature, my affections are very strong. By day or night I can never forget those whom I have loved and whom I believe to have ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... musket made him grunt with pain. Pulling the stopper from his powder-horn with his teeth, Jabez poured in a charge, and was ramming the bullet home when he felt his right leg double under him and burn as if red-hot iron had seared it. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... vegetation. Stones, sucked up from the ground by the mounting sap, still remained adhering to the trunk. High branches bent down to earth again, and, taking root, surrounded the parent tree with lofty arches, a nation of new trunks which ever increased and multiplied. Upon the bark, seared with bleeding wounds, were ripening fruit-pods; the mere effort of bearing fruit strained the old monster's skin until it split. The young folks walked slowly round it, passing under the arched branches which formed as it ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... he spoke the words, he had laid the red-hot point to his breast and had drawn it down and crosswise; and a little line of thin, white smoke followed the hissing iron along the seared flesh. He threw the bar down upon the threshold of his door and came to join the throng, the strange smile on his rough face and the light of another world in his fire-reddened eyes. But though the multitude ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. The cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well understand. Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words "years" and "curse" issued from the twisted mouth. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... 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. He had seen that religion ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... but a dread reality. It has filled our cup with sorrow; it is mingled with every tear that falls upon the dying patriot's couch; it is wafted with every agonizing sigh that follows the departed spirit; it is felt in every house of mourning, and is seared, in letters of fire and blood, upon the memory ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... come not singly,—the seared heart is not suffered to heal from one affliction ere another succeeds it; and this anticipation of the coming evil is, perhaps, one of the most poignant features of grief,—the ever-watchful ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... to quicken his horse's pace, he hastened forward to examine his game. He was still so excited that he was almost upon the outstretched carcass before he noticed the odd scar on its side. He bent down and saw that the mark was a cattle brand seared on the hide with ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... conversion. We 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, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... twenty thousand sheep, no man would know or care. There in the dusty silences of 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
... among the roses, while the sun is going down and the sweet summer wind plays softly in the leaves, and from the little gray church close by a solemn strain of music—the vesper hymn—floats out upon the stillness of the darkening day. The woman is all happiness, confidence, and hope; the man, seared and blighted by conscious sin and subdued by long years of patient submission to the sense of his own unworthiness, is all gentleness, solicitude, reverence, and sorrow. At this supreme moment, when now it ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... people, all places are alike to them bitter in the recollection. The Belgian, disinherited, can never summon a presence out of the past which will not, in its coming, bring burning and slaughter. All that was fair in his consciousness has been seared with horror. Where can he go to be at home? To England? To a new continent? What stranger-city will give him back his memories? He is condemned forever to live in the moment, never to let his mind stray over the past. For, in the past, in gracious prospect, lie village and city of Flanders, and the ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond me, only some drops did still remain that now and then would fall upon me; but because my former frights and anguish were very sore and deep, therefore it oft befell me still, as it befalleth those that have been seared with the fire, I thought every voice was, "Fire, fire'!" Every little touch ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... hard green-hide ropes blistered the unaccustomed hands of the new-chum white boys, but they set their teeth and held on. Beast after beast fell with a bellowing roar, the red-hot T.D.3 was pressed on its near-side shoulder till the mark was seared right into the skin, so that it could never wear out. Then the ropes were pulled off and the dazed animal scrambled to its feet and was hustled out of the yard, while another one ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... the ray seared down—then, as it boomeranged back, the disc burst into flame, dissolved, disintegrated. A thin dust, like carbon, slowly settled to the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... that her lips looked seared, and instead of disputing my claim, or inquiring about my mother, or telling me to begone, she was up on her feet. Taking her dress in her finger tips and settling back almost to the ground in the most beautiful obeisance ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... with them,' if we shrink in the time of peril, or feel unwilling to sacrifice ourselves, if need be, for their sake. I thank the Lord that there is yet life enough left to feel the truth, even though it rages at it—that conscience is not so completely seared as to be unmoved by the truth ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... he flung away the end of his cigar,—it fell into a harmless bed of mignonette and seared the sweet blossom, burning redly in the green like a wicked eye. And then he caught her hand firmly and held it grasped as ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... with horror. It was as if at that moment the heavens had cracked asunder and the night had fallen away in chaos. Turning, I saw the cone of the mountain lifting skyward in fragments—and saw no more, for the blinding vision remained seared upon the retina ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of that long night remained clear in the Adjutant's memory. The miserable seared days of these women were echoed in their sleep. Groans; curses; snatches of song; angry or weary talk, with heavy breathing troubled the night. Oh, the sorrows that follow in the wake of sin; it pressed upon Kate Lee's heart ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... I dare say," said I; "the greatest monster that ever existed, though the worthiest head which the pope system ever had—so his conscience was not always still. I thought it had been seared with ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... proceeded westward. They camped where the night overtook them, sometimes near water and grass, sometimes in bare dry places. To the westward the plateau widened. Rugged ridges rose here and there, and seared crags split the sky like sharp sawteeth. And after many miles of wild up-ranging they reached a divide which marked the line of ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... The whole of the immense structure was blazing. Spires of flame leaped and 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 the ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... that is entirely dead. With our knife we will remove at least one half of this excess of wood, leaving as much young wood of the previous season's growth as possible by thinning out the old limbs and dead wood severely. Here is one Moss Rose bush, the stems appear as brown and looking as seared as a berry; it is apparently winter killed, and by cutting into it we find that to be the case; the roots are in all probability sound, and we will cut the stems down to the ground and cover the place with a forkful of stable manure; if the roots are alive it will grow and bloom the ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... up the sky. Erick clapped his hands over his eyes. The flash whitened, growing larger, expanding. Suddenly there was a roar, and a furious hot wind rushed past him, throwing him on his face in the sand. The hot dry wind licked and seared at them, crackling the bits of branches into flame. Mara and Jan shut their ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... consequence, naturally, Isobel did receive "no answer," a fact from which she drew her own conclusions. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these seared her soul. She had written to Godfrey, she had humbled herself before Godfrey, and he sent her—no answer. It never occurred to her to make inquiries as to the fate of that letter, except once when she asked the housemaid ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... fifteen years and before he knew it had stepped square on it with the iron plated heel of his work boots, squashin' the crystal into the works. And six weeks later he'd carelessly rested a red hot clinker rake on his right foot and had seared off a couple of toes. But the climax came when he managed to bug the safety catch on the foolproof ash elevator and took a 20-foot drop with about a ton of loaded ash cans. He only had a leg broken, at ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... she might have dreamed of were impossible, and that Warrington, reading in her heart, perhaps, had told his melancholy story to warn her, she had not asked herself whether it was possible that her affections could change; and had been shocked and seared by the discovery of the truth. How should she have told it to Helen, and confessed her shame? Poor Laura felt guilty before her friend, with the secret which she dared not confide to her; felt as if she ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her hand inside his arm, in her own confiding way, and, looking affectionately into the seamed and seared old face, she said, with roguish sweetness: "I tell you what, Uncle Dan! We shall have to grow ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... knows what passed between Lettice Todd and her God in that dim forsaken temple of a buried faith? Death closes tenderly even the eyes full of tears, and her face was beautiful with a strange peace, though its loveliness was marred and its youth "seared with the autumn ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... drift, where one or two others were being rolled and buffeted; while others still, with a keening Irishman in their grasp, were lugging him back to hospital; while Corporal Cassidy, with his hair singed close to his head, his face and hands seared and his clothing soaked, smoking, and a general wreck, was striving to evade his handlers and stand attention to the colonel, who for his part was bending over Bob Lanier just emerging from his third involuntary plunge in ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... dreaded the sneers and jeers of his companions—he had become callous to those— but he shrank from encountering the daily, wearing, gnawing trial of his wife's taunts and reproaches; for the restless uneasiness of a conscience not yet quite seared into utter insensibility made the unhappy woman doubly bitter in her attacks upon abstinence and abstainers. And thus matters ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... 1669), gave a terrible account of Marsilly's death. (For the letter, see Note V.) With a broken piece of glass (as we learn from another source), Marsilly, in prison, wounded himself in a ghastly manner, probably hoping to die by loss of blood. They seared him with a red-hot iron, and hurried on his execution. He was broken on the wheel, and was two hours in dying (June 22). Contrary to usage, a Protestant preacher was brought to attend him on the scaffold. He came most reluctantly, expecting insult, but not a taunt was uttered by the fanatic ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... among which he labored. It was as though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes almost at once, in the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... 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
... is too long 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 ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... senses. Everything was unreal. For a time I was quite numb. But then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over and over, the one terrible ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... my shirt, when lo! upon my breast I beheld imprinted a picture of the direful deed—seared in by rays more potent than the sun's—photographed there, as if by the lightning's ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... had a heart, and with it lived my life: * 'Twas seared with fire and burnt with loving-lowe: I never won the blessing of her love; * God would not on His slave such boon bestow: If what I've tasted be the food of Love, * Must taste it all men who love food ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... but they are beasts, who have no idea of God as a personal agent, or of sin as evil, otherwise than as an offense against each other, which may or may not be punished by the party offended.... Their consciences are seared, and moral perceptions blunted. Their memories retain scarcely anything we teach them, and so low have they sunk that the plainest text in the whole Bible cannot ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... 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 through her. ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... nor under the caressing glimmer of the alcove which gave her naked form the delicious vagueness of a Milky Way, but in a harsh, diffused daylight, by the circumstantial illumination of a sunlight devoid of splendour and without shadows, which revealed beneath her veil her eyelids that were seared with tears, her pearly cheeks and roughened lips, he realized that he felt for this woman's flesh a ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... set down in the trenches on the Gallipoli ridge and told to hold them. No one who is familiar with the conditions under which these Turkish soldiers fought, who knows how wretched were the conditions under which they lived, who has seen those waterless, sun-seared ridges which they held against the might of Britain's navy and the best troops which the Allies could bring against them, can withhold from them his admiration. Their valor was deserving ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... sorrow have I drained, Watching the stars of night go by, for sleepless languishment! It had sufficed me, had thy grace with verses come to me; My expectation still on thee in the foredawns was bent. Then was my heart by that which caused my agitation seared, And from mine eyelids still the tears poured down without relent. Yea, nevermore I ceased from that wherewith I stricken was; My night with wakefulness was filled, my heart with dreariment. But now hath Allah from my heart blotted the love of thee, After for ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... feelings of our nature than the exercise of unlimited power. The man, who in the beginning of such a career, might shudder at the idea of taking away the life of a fellow-being, might soon have his conscience so seared by the repetition of crime, that the agonies of his murdered victims might become music to his soul, and the drippings of the scaffold afford blood to swim in. History is ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... with something that is a little like love." They come to remember that there are other children in the world on whom reckless instinct has thrust the gift, of life—neglected children, stunted and maimed in mind if not in body. And now that her egoism is seared to the quick, the mother-instinct asserts itself in Rita. She will take these children to her—these children to whom her hand and her heart have hitherto been closed. They shall be outwardly in Eyolf's place, and perhaps in time they may fill the place in her heart that should ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... them believe in annihilation. Better let them think that the sleep of death is the end of all! Better, much better, let them believe that the tender kiss at parting is the last of all consciousness for them, and after that eternal rest! Don't let their hearts be seared, their lives clouded, their intellects dwarfed by the cruel dread of the God of Moses! Better, thrice better, let the cold earth close over the loved and loving dust forever, than that it should enter the ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... sword. A man in a black gown read from a manuscript: "She is no respecter of persons." Then a youth wearing a red cap Leaped to her side and snatched away the bandage. And lo, the lashes had been eaten away From the oozy eye-lids; The eye-balls were seared with a milky mucus; The madness of a dying soul Was written on her face— But the multitude saw why ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... paused to look about me. The wind still roared in the distance, and against the blue eastern sky it had a column of snow whirling that was dazzling white in the afternoon sun. On my left a mountain rose with easy slope to crag-crowned heights, and for miles swept away before me with seared side barren and dull. A few cloudlets of snowdrifts and a scattering of mere tufts of snow stood out distinctly on this big, ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... heart to turn to him for a help he did not venture to intrude. It seemed a long while that they remained so, but at last Christine sat up, turning upon him a face so strange and terrible that he trembled at the look of it. Sorrow had seared it like a blight. She had been lying upon a seam in the lounge and it had left a red mark across her face. He thought it looked like the wound upon her heart ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... distinct sequence. He knew where he was now—at the "Little Devil." Had he not himself descended its ladders into the mine's burning pits? Was not that why he was undersized and weak of lungs? He bore scars that had seared even deeper than through the flesh. He knew the huts, too: caves in which men lived like beasts. It was all clear except the surroundings in which he found himself. The haggard faces of his brother and his sister-in-law were familiar, yet not as he remembered them. The withered bodies of ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... self-slain, till the air seemed to be poisonous with death, and the grasses, as they moved, to whisper to the winds dread secrets of the Past. And here the light of the summer evening did not come, but only through the leafless boughs of one seared tree, which broke and parted the dark barrier of forest growth, they saw the west, and the sun declining slowly in its haze of golden air, sinking downward past ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... journey she tried to review what had happened in the light of her new decision and of her sudden relief from pain. She seemed to herself to have passed through some fiery initiation from which she had emerged seared and quivering, but clutching to her breast a magic talisman. Sophy Viner had cried out to her: "Some day you'll know!" and Darrow had used the same words. They meant, she supposed, that when she had explored the intricacies and darknesses of her own heart her judgment ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... husband's arms, listening dazedly to his passionate protestations and his earnest self-denunciation. Bob had received the fright of his life, his lesson had been seared into him, and he lost no time in telling his wife ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Iolaus to fire a little grove of trees near by. Iolaus at once set the fire, and when the saplings were well aflame he seized them and, standing by the hero, as fast as Hercules cut off a head of the hydra he seared the neck with a flaming brand. The searing prevented the heads from growing again. When all the eight mortal heads had thus been dispatched Hercules struck off the one said to be immortal and buried it in the roadway, setting a heavy stone above. The body of the hydra he ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... sudden, a crash of thunder rolled and reverberated through the glen. Lightning for an instant lit up the meadows and the river. The glare of it almost blinded the young farmer and, out of the line of fire, he sank to the earth and covered his eyes, seared by the sudden, ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... a lot of pastur'-hickory cut and corded, that's well seared over now,—and if you'd like some of it, I can let you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... 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 and the antique diamond ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... of which is, 'God is love.' Evidently Baltic wished to convert sinners by playing on their fears rather than by appealing to their religious feelings, although it was certainly true that those rascals with whom he had to deal probably had no elements of belief whatsoever in their seared minds. ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... into her heart. Ah, she would be on her knees, begging, begging, and her father would struggle in vain at his shackles. Spurned; so be it. She should have a taste of his hate, the black man's hate. Two should hold her by the arms while the professional flogger seared the white soft back of her. She would soon come to him begging. He had been too kind. The lash of the zenana, it should bite into her soft flesh. He would break her spirit and her body together and fling her into his own zenana to let her gnaw her heart out in suspense. She should be the ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... the Reptile clan in the same tribe think that if one of them touches or smells a snake, it will make his hair white. In Samoa people whose god was a butterfly believed that if they caught a butterfly it would strike them dead. Again, in Samoa the reddish-seared leaves of the banana-tree were commonly used as plates for handing food; but if any member of the Wild Pigeon family had used banana leaves for this purpose, it was supposed that he would suffer from rheumatic swellings or an eruption all over the body ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... name for coaxing balky youths to take their fences, and was finally able to take up the more congenial task of expounding "the antiquities" to cultured travellers. I call it more congenial—but how it must have seared his soul! Fancy unveiling the sacred scars of Time to ladies who murmur: "Was this actually the spot—?" while they absently feel for their hatpins! He used to say that nothing kept him at it but the exquisite thought of accumulating the lire ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... whose conscience was seared, went to the house of Vandermaclin, counted down his twelve thousand guilders, and claimed his bride; and Vandermaclin, who felt that his daughter's happiness was at stake, now gave his consent. As M'Clise stated that he was anxious to return to England, and arrange with the merchants whose goods ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... 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 of a ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... consulting their stomachs, may very likely be misled by their vitiated feelings. But their abnormal state is itself the result of transgressing their feelings. Had they from childhood never disobeyed what we may term the physical conscience, it would not have been seared, but would have remained a ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... olive's easy grain; And next, a wedge to drive with sweepy 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, and ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it was as if a hedgehog-skin were on him. If any one touched him unawares, or pushed against his ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... obscured the sky and the snow was falling again. My hands were bare and numb, except where the cold steel of the pistol triggers seared my fingers ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... 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 of course renders her wretched, if not jealous, and reverses the faculties of both ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... in which he arrived at them—whether in a slothful and selfish, or in an honest and truth-seeking manner; but being now his soul's convictions, you can give no other law than this—"You must obey your conscience." For no man's conscience gets so seared by doing what is wrong unknowingly, as by doing that which appears to be wrong to his conscience. The Jews' consciences did not get seared by their slaying the Canaanites, but they did become seared by their failing to do what appeared to them to be right. Therefore, woe to you if you do what ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson |
