"Toughened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sharp days, when the touch of metal was like the bite of fangs and echoes filled the valley to the brim with an empty clanging. But they were no ordinary fellows—no chaff, to drift with the wind: they were men toughened by exposure to the breath of the north, men winnowed out from many thousands of their kind. Nor were they driven: they were led. Mellen was among them constantly; so was the soft-voiced smiling Parker, not to mention O'Neil with his cheery laugh and his ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... poised on long legs she walks with the uncertain step common to all young things. She hunts field-mice, shrew-mice—even partridge, and this hard work in the fields has toughened her young muscles and given a rather gloomy expression ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... had ever breathed a word of love in her ears. 'The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.' The first sound of a lover's voice brings a thrill to a girl's heart which she never knows but once. Miss Lenox's perceptions in that way must be considerably toughened: sole-leather is nothing in thickness compared to the epidermis of a coquette's heart. Now, a man can love with delicacy, fervor, passion a score of times. Women are frail creatures, are they not? I would like to have my little girl give her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... a duel of endurance between Captain Jack, wiry, toughened and fully matured, with heavier muscles, and the ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... the woman who had "sorrowed of her sorrows" in all the years of the lonely colorless infancy, childhood, and budding womanhood! The old bookworm clung to the papers as if that "documentary evidence" was an absolute guaranty, and he held it ready to proffer in support of his theorem. His toughened heart-strings were silent at natural affection's touch, and only twanged to the never-dying greed ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish stock which a generation or two in the wilderness had toughened and strengthened. They had not yet ciphered it out that one red hunter and trapper must waste the fifty thousand acres which would support the families of a hundred white farmers in comfort and prosperity; ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... stimulate me as Abigail did, but she involved my emotional nature more powerfully. Something of resentment fortified my present neutral attitude toward her. Why, after all, need Zoe have affected her so profoundly? Perhaps my own thinking was toughened by my experiences. I had killed a man for Zoe; I had been through a trial with Fortescue. Surely if there had been any bloom on me it had been rubbed off. Why had not Dorothy seen in me a practical, courageous heart, who took his fate and made the best of it? Was ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... dealt him another blow that would have been a "knock-out" for most people. But he has stood so many, and outlived happier people, that I begin to believe that if the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, the hides, or the hearts, of some people are toughened to ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... of darkness would allow. Setting my face to the wind once more, I ran until I fell from exhaustion. Then, after five minutes of panting among the heather, I made another start, until again my knees gave way beneath me. I was young and hard, with muscles of steel, and a frame which had been toughened by twelve years of camp and field. Thus I was able to keep up this wild flight for another three hours, during which I still guided myself, you understand, by keeping the wind in my face. At the end of that time I calculated that I had put nearly twenty miles ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ever produced. He is the one man on whose vigorous mind no outside influence had ever told. Brought up at his father's farm at Tusculum, he spent his boyhood amid the labours of the plough. Hard work and scant fare toughened his sinews, and service under Fabius in the Hannibalic war knit his frame into that iron strength of endurance, which, until his death, never betrayed one sign of weakness or fatigue. A saying of his is ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... be the pilot," said the trapper; "my hand is not so steady as it used to be; but he has limbs like toughened hickory. Leave all to the wisdom ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... little lamb," Mrs. Corbett cried, "and she's lonely and homesick, and you've taken advantage of it. That poor lamb can't stand the prairie like us old pelters that's weatherbeaten and gray and toughened—she ain't made for it—she was intended for diamond rings and drawing-rooms, and silks ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... upon any other, these five years had left their mark. The hard grind of daily work, the daily burden of administration, had toughened the fibre of his character and hardened the temper of his spirit, and this hardening and toughening could be seen in every line of his face and in every motion of his body. Twice during the five years he had been sent by Jack French ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... nerves were solid. A firm constitution hardened by thirty years of seafaring and by the consistent and temperate regularity which was part of his character, had so toughened his natural strength as to put him almost beyond the reach of mortal ills; otherwise he must have broken down under the mental strain thus forced upon him. It is no light thing to do faithfully the utmost to save ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... Verendrye's eldest son, had advanced still farther and had made his way to Lake Winnipeg. He took with him a handful of toughened veterans, and tramped on snow-shoes through the frozen forest—four hundred and fifty miles in the stern midwinter {31} of a region bitterly cold. Near the mouth of the Winnipeg river, where it empties into Lake Winnipeg, they found ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... he exclaimed. "You not here! Things wouldn't grow, miss." He checked himself, his weather-toughened skin reddening because he was afraid he had perhaps taken a liberty. And then moving his hat uneasily on his head, he took another. "But it's true enough," looking down on the gravel walk, "we—we couldn't expect ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... other of my addled eggs of invention, I may mention that in my chemistry days as a youth I suggested to a scientific neighbour, Dr. Kerrison, that glass might be rendered less fragile by being mixed in the casting with some chemical compound of lead,—much as now has come out in the patent toughened glass. Also we initiated mild experiments about an imitation of volcanic forces in melting pounded stone into moulds,—as recently done by Mr. Lindsay Bucknall with slag:—but unluckily we found that the manufacture of basalt was beyond our small furnace power: I fancied that apparently carved ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Commandant thought. A snow job and a crude one. He studied the youngster. He had never seen such a brace from an Io-bred fourth-classman. It must be torture to muscles not yet toughened up to even Lunar gravity. Five minutes more and the boy would have to give way, and serve him ...
— The Adventurer • Cyril M. Kornbluth
... bent forward. He was about fifty. The hand that rested for a moment on David Raine's knee was red and knotted. It was the hand of a man who had lived his life in struggling with the wilderness. And the face, too, was of such a man; a face coloured and toughened by the tannin of wind and blizzard and hot northern sun, with eyes cobwebbed about by a myriad of fine lines that spoke of years spent under the strain of those things. He was not a large man. He was shorter than David Raine. There was a slight droop to his shoulders. ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... breaking hemp. He soon had the knack of that: his muscles were toughened already. He learned what it was sometimes to eat his dinner in the fields, warming it, maybe, on the coals of a stump set on fire near his brake; to bale his hemp at nightfall and follow the slide or wagon to the barn; there to wait with the negroes till it was ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... words the cripple fixed upon the speaker the hard ironic eye of one toughened and defiant in misery, and, in the end, grinned upon him with his ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... expedition, returning from the south, made camp on the bank of the Rio Colorado twenty miles below Rubio City. It was the last night out. Supper was over and the men, with their pipes and cigarettes, settled themselves in various careless attitudes of repose after the long day. Their sun-burned faces, toughened figures and worn, desert-stained clothing testified to their weeks of toil in the open air under the dry sky of an almost rainless land. Some were old-timers—veterans of many a similar campaign. Two were new recruits on their first trip. All were strong, clean-cut, vigorous specimens of intelligent, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... a trading post on Gray Cloud Island, sixteen miles below St. Paul and was a Justice of the Peace with unlimited jurisdiction. Pigs Eye, an old toughened voyageur and a young fellow, both claimed the same quarter section of land and agreed to refer their quarrel to Brown. Accordingly both appeared at his place on Gray Cloud and stated their cases to Brown. Brown knowing that he had no jurisdiction over land titles and seeing an opportunity ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... in the Maori's time, Now, toughened by a thousand gales, Straight stands the kauri in its prime, Fit mast ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... with assonance where the other must have rhyme; and in many long and popular ballads, such as Tiftie's Annie and Geordie, there is scarcely so much as a good sound rhyme from beginning to end. One sometimes fancies that these Aberdonian ballads bear signs of being 'nirled' and toughened by the stress of the East Wind; they are true products of a keen, sharp climate working upon a deep and rich, but somewhat ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... a good soldier," said the general, gruffly; "he is well toughened. I went through that kind of thing ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... what the bait used is, how the ruin is wrought and what the remedies are. Save as he does this his voice will not reach far, nor his protests have in them the moral ring of the man who knows. The daring youth and the toughened rascals soon detect whether a man talks from aroused conviction and a pointed purpose, or whether he is just preaching in the air and saying things that ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... lawn-mower, as it is difficult to get the blades high enough to allow this length. In cutting for the first time, try to do it on a cloudy day, as this will prevent any possibility of scorching or burning. After a few weeks the grass will have so toughened that it will be benefited by ...
— Making a Lawn • Luke Joseph Doogue
... pounds of Arizona bone and muscle, toughened by years of hard work in sun and wind, had clamped itself upon him. The nozzle twisted toward the janitor. He ducked, went down, and was instantly submerged. When he tried to rise, the stream beat him back. He struggled halfway up, slipped, got again to his feet, and came ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... at a great gait for one who walked. Life for months without a roof had been hard, but it had toughened wonderfully those whom it did not kill, and John with a magnificent constitution was one of those who had profited most. He felt no weariness now although he had come ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is in the four boys and their two guides, who now were assembled in the camp. Every boy was bronzed and toughened by his exposure and labors. Packs were to be seen which had been brought into camp on the backs of the various members of the party. Each pack contained about sixty pounds of food and materials necessary for the expedition. In addition, ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... hurt Henry's toughened hand, and exerting the great strength of his will over his body he continued to lie perfectly motionless. The bird, satisfied that this food was beyond his powers, stood motionless for a few moments, then flapped his wings two or three times to indicate that ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... up, the lift doors clanged open and the grimy finger of the elevator boy indicated the office. Again the man hesitated, examining the door carefully. The upper half was of toughened glass and bore the ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace |
