"White elephant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brighten with amusement, if not with admiration. Of course, the Stars and Stripes hung highest, with the English lion ramping on the royal standard close by; then followed a regular picture-gallery, for there was the white elephant of Siam, the splendid peacock of Burmah, the double-headed Russian eagle and black dragon of China, the winged lion of Venice, and the prancing pair on the red, white and blue flag of Holland. The keys and miter of the Papal States were a hard job, but up they went at last, with the yellow ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon {196} Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... fifteen-year-old niece, who was born into the world with a delicate constitution, an unhappy disposition and the proverbial gold spoon in her mouth as far as finances were concerned. The poor professor felt that he had been left with something worse than a white elephant on his hands, for he knew absolutely nothing about girls, and Marion, with her morbid, super-sensitive temperament, was a constant puzzle to him. She had been in a convent school until recently. But now her physicians advised that she ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... built our Country Club, a few of us have learned to enjoy ourselves in a fitful and guilty fashion late in the afternoon. But as a rule, even to-day, when you give a Homeburg man a bright golden daylight hour of leisure, he has no more use for it than he would have for a five-ton white elephant with an appetite for ice-cream. And that, Jim, is why I can't speed myself up to appreciate a young man who has never worked and never intends to. I still have to look at him with my Homeburg eyes. And in Homeburg, when a man doesn't work when he has a chance and takes what amusement ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... address may be correctly said to have as much truth as poetry. It is a graceful summary of the curiosities which Barnum had brought before the world up to his sixtieth year. It does not include the Sacred White Elephant of Siam, the mammoth Jumbo and other wonders of nature which he was yet to reveal to astonished and delighted millions. Nor does it indicate that grand genius of aggregation by which in later years he surpassed all his previous ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... himself up in scarlet and purple robes with stars on. Through his Zion City Bank and Zion City Realty Company he became enormously wealthy; he finally announced himself as "Elijah the Restorer." I remember as a boy how he brought his gospel to New York, and P.T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white elephant never made such a sensation. The ridicule of the metropolis overwhelmed the old prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and his tabernacle and his bank to his son; straightway, according to the rule of all ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... come high," young Prescott answered. "If it does, we'll begin right by telling him that we have no money—-that we've nothing in fact but a birchbark white elephant on our hands." ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... Tom Cabin in the Clearin Dorsey, the Young Adventurer Fighting Phil Four Boys Great Cattle Trail Honest Ned Hunt of the White Elephant Iron Heart Lena Wingo, the Mohawk Lost in the Forbidden Land Lucky Ned Mountain Star On the Trail of the Moose Plucky Dick Queen of the Clouds Righting the Wrong River and Jungle River Fugitives Secret of Coffin Island Shod with Silence Teddy and Towser Through Forest and ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... the other men, and March said: "You ought to be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It's a disgrace to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hold of all their chief cities except Ava, and why that was not taken is more than I can say. We might certainly have captured it, with the king, his white elephant, and all his lords and ladies together, not to speak of his treasure, which would have given us something handsome in the way of prize-money. Perhaps it was thought best not to drive him to desperation, as we had already punished him, or rather, ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston |
