"Spontaneous combustion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I'll just take a thimbleful of your best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... other point on which I offer a word of remark. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state of the body, that it is no wonder they are often confounded. And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they over-work themselves, the more ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... astonishment, exclaiming: "Hilloe! All the witches! Here's Cap! Why, where on earth did you shoot from? What's up now? You look as if you were in a state of spontaneous combustion and couldn't stand ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... that there are any difficulties. The ground was a bog, and as fast as earth was tipped in at the top it bulged out at the bottom. When, after great labour, this difficulty had been overcome, part of the embankment, fifty feet in height, which contained alum shale, decomposed, and spontaneous combustion ensued. The amazement of the villagers was great, but finally they came to the conclusion expressed by one of them, in "Dang it, they can't make this here railway arter all, and they've set it o' fire to ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
|
