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Limelight   Listen
noun
limelight  n.  (Theat.) That part of the stage upon which the limelight is cast, usually where the most important action is progressing or where the leading player or players are placed and upon which the attention of the spectators is therefore concentrated. Hence, A conspicuous position before the public; the center of public attention; used mostly in the phrase in the limelight; as, politicians who are never happy except in the limelight.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Limelight" Quotes from Famous Books



... to-night. No one else has ever done it for a newspaper. You are the first, my dear sir. I am a simple man. I don't like to be in the newspapers. The long and tiresome litigation over my poor uncle's estate has kept me more or less in the limelight, as you fellows would say, and there have been times when I willingly would have given up the fight if my lawyers had allowed me to do so. But a lawyer is something you can't get rid of, once you've got him—or he's got you, strictly ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... might have, and bear no deeper guilt than that of theft; but, the clothes! Mr. Amidon shuddered as his logic carried him on from deduction to reduction—to murder, and the ghastly putting away of murder's fruit. Imagination threw its limelight over the horrid scene—the deep pool or tarn sending up oilily its bubbles of accusation; the shadowy wood with its bulging mound of earth and leaves swept by revealing rains and winds; the moldy vat of corrosive liquid eating away the damning evidence; the box with ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... cake? How long do you expect to hold an audience in a court-room with that kind of stuff? You want to get down to business, and call me "Tweedlums Babe" and "Honeysuckle," and sign yourself "Mama's Own Big Bad Puggy Wuggy Boy" if you want any limelight to concentrate upon your sparse gray hairs. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... "butters" enjoy themselves, even though other people don't enjoy them. They love to take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you from the sunshine into the shady side of every garden. Not their delight is it to work the limelight. Rather they prefer to cast a shadow—when they can't turn out the lights altogether. And, strangely enough, these people are the very people whose life is passed in the pleasantest places. It may be that, metaphorically speaking, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... focusing of attention upon him, and this time Arizona seemed to regret that he stood in the limelight. ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand

... so far as that," said Ricardo reluctantly. His indignation was rapidly evaporating. For there was growing up in his mind a pleasant perception that the advertisement placed him in the limelight. ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... days later I was again in the crowded beer hall when Herr Thomas entered. He liked to be in the limelight, and had a most extraordinary manner of apparently addressing his conversation to some selected individual, but carried it on in a tone which could be heard throughout the entire room. The Russian whistle which he still wore, and of which he was very ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... manna to them. They must occupy the limelight. Pains are magnified or manufactured to attract sympathy; they pose as martyrs—refusing food at table, and eating sweets in their room, or stealing down to the larder at night—to the same end. If mild ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... what were they? the straw with which the bricks of personality are made. A comparison of Lavengro with Borrow's letters to the Bible Society is instructive; it is the same Borrow that appears in both, with the sole difference that in the Letters he is less mysterious, less in the limelight than in Lavengro. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... necessarily mean taking the world by storm and being tremendously popular with people. It may sometimes mean retiring to the background and playing a very insignificant part, instead of being always in the limelight. A good leader is first of all a good team worker, one who is willing to suppress her own personal inclinations for the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey

... expected the Liberal leadership, the close of the war and almost the end of Laurier should have found the member for Prince ready for action or advice. But there is no record that, at this time, his counsels were sought by the Liberal party, or that he thrust himself into the limelight. Three months after the Armistice, Laurier was dead. Even then King was not mentioned as his successor. Four months later he was chosen, when not even he quite understood how it was done. King did nothing to reform ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... character. When this lady covered up the Teutonic name of her firm with a Red Cross flag and converted her showrooms into a hospital ward, excellently supplied except with wounded men, the police did not inquire into the case until a political scandal brought it into the limelight of publicity. ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... note the league enjoyed an average season, and a considerable amount of new blood was injected into the game in the persons of players who made good without attracting freakish attention. The rise of the Washington team from seventh to second place brought its youngsters into the limelight prominently, and of these Foster and Moeller were commended highly. Gandil, who had his second tryout in fast company, plugged the hole at first base which had worried Washington managers for some time. Shanks also made a reputation for himself as a fielder. These ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster

... eagerness to wipe out the stain on his honour, and the honour of the house. But, like Drummond, he could not help harbouring a suspicion that this was a pose. He felt that Sheen was intoxicated by his imagination. Every one likes to picture himself doing dashing things in the limelight, with an appreciative multitude to applaud. Would this mood stand the test ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse

... marguerites and corn-flowers in her unbound hair, she circled her own reflection, languid, pale, desolate; then slowly gaining the abandon needful to a full display, danced with frenzy till, in a gleam of limelight, she sank into the apparent water and floated among paper water-lilies on her back. Lovely she looked there, with her eyes still open, her lips parted, her hair trailing behind. And again Fiorsen raised his hands high to clap, and again called out: 'Brava!' But the curtain fell, and Ophelia did not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... crippled and forced to run herself aground by a tug-boat manned by Cuban patriots, and by a single gun served by one man, and that man an American. It was the first sea-fight of the war. Over night a Cuban navy had been born, and into the limelight a cub reporter had projected a new "hero," a ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis

... and things. I have nevertheless asked his indulgence, this time, for a note or two concerning yet older fashions, in order to bring into sharper clearness the leading outlines of literary fact, which I ventured only in my last paper to secure in silhouette, obscurely asserting itself against the limelight of recent moral creed, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... cheviot and worsted at dubious table d'hotes, at whirlwind lunch counters, on sandwiches and beer in his hall-bedroom. He was willing to do that, for he was a true son of the great city of razzle-dazzle, and to him one evening in the limelight made up for ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... taking it. Do I think it's important? Is that what you mean? Important certainly to managers and stage-carpenters who want to make money, to ladies and gentlemen who want to produce themselves in public by limelight, and to other ladies and gentlemen who are bored and stupid and don't know what to do with their evening. It's a commercial and social convenience which may be infinitely worked. But important artistically, intellectually? ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... that the excellent homicide, having done so simple a bit of the day's work as that of decapitating a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious theatrical group, with limelight effects on the Kremlin and the honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... had as good a "nose for a story" as the best of reporters, and every story that came his way was sure to find its way into print. No matter how driven with pressing matters nor how tired he never denied himself to "the newspaper boys." He believed that the more prominence, the more "limelight," he could secure the better, provided he used it for the promotion of his work. Thus he presented the apparent anomaly of being at the same time one of the most modest and unassuming of men and also one of the ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe

... race bear the stigma of cupidity and meanness. It is wholly undeserved. The sums annually devoted to charitable purposes, by such a family as the Elschilds—my very good friends—are truly stupendous. But the Elschilds do not seek the limelight. Mr. Rohscheimer, Baron Hague, Sir Leopold Jesson, Mr. Hohsmann—and your father, are celebrated only for their unscrupulous commercial methods in the formation of combines. They do not distribute their wealth. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... pain does not force the elimination of its own cause, it is an added evil. The death of the innocent, through oppression, child labor, dirt diseases, or airless tenements, ought to arrest the attention of the community and put the social cause of their death in the limelight. In that case they have died a vicarious death which helps to redeem the rest from a social evil, and anyone who utilizes their suffering for that end, shows his reverence for their death. We owe that duty in even higher measure to the prophets, who are not ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... nicely," said Herman Krech, who never liked to be out of the limelight too long. "It wasn't for money, it wasn't for revenge, it wasn't jealousy; by the time we've eliminated a few more motives we'll have only the correct ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... admitted Wagstaffe quickly. "Thank God, these fellows are only a minority, and a freak minority at that; but freak minorities seem to get the monopoly of the limelight ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... never vilified. Only those whose merits have placed them in the limelight are the targets for the attacks of envy and ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke

... be! All that horrible publicity. All that concentrating of crude popular interest on themselves! Believe me, nobody who watches a public career carefully but sees the demoralizing effect the limelight has even on men's characters. And I suppose you'll admit that men are less delicately ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... would have through its facilities in making reputations may also be exaggerated. Reputations are mysterious things and not so easily forced, and even if it were possible for a section of the Press to limelight a dozen or so figures up to the legislature, they would still have, I think, to be interesting, sympathetic and individualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozen among four hundred men of a repute more naturally achieved. A third ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... history of Asia. Yuan Shih-kai, being then merely a junior general officer under the orders of the Chinese Imperial Resident, is of no particular importance; but it is significant of the man that he should suddenly come well under the limelight on the first possible occasion. On 6th December, 1884, leading 2,000 Chinese troops, and acting in concert with 3,000 Korean soldiers, he attacked the Tong Kwan Palace in which the Japanese Minister and his staff, ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... dragged me from obscurity into the limelight of the war to play my little part. It's over. I've nothing more to do on the stage. Fate rings down the curtain. I must go back into obscurity. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... has been explained in Chapter VI., an ordinary acetylene flame has a higher temperature than a coal-gas flame. It is likely that a blowpipe fed with "Linde-air" (oxygen diluted with less nitrogen than in the atmosphere) and acetylene would give as high a limelight effect as the oxy-hydrogen ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... hungry for fame, who are eager for the limelight, whose ears itch for the sound of applause, are, of course, quickly responsive to flattery. If they are fine-textured and have delicate features, small hands and feet, flattery must be of a refined and delicate nature. If, on the other hand, they are of ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... and if we get anything on him it's up to us to keep them out of the limelight. It won't be hard. He only went to their house now and again as he went to lots of others. If this Chinese story pans out as promising as it looks, then we can put Lorry wise and tell her to hang out the 'not at home' sign when Mr. Mayer comes around. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... we got all the big newspapers in the country on our side? And aren't the banks in the legislative limelight? They couldn't pull off anything mean on us, because we would keep in touch with our editor friends. If they started firing the boys we could appeal ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... he held the centre of the stage, and it was easy to read in his bearing the consciousness that he deserved the limelight. A strip of crimson carpet had been stretched across the sand to the very water's edge; on either side of it a dozen decorous footmen were aligned, and between them Monsieur Pelletan proudly marched, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... day when five reporters had gathered, and Carl felt very much in the limelight, waiting in the nacelle of the machine for the time to start. The propeller was revolved, Carl drew a long breath and stuck up his hand—and the engine stopped. He was relieved. It had seemed a terrific responsibility to go up alone. He wouldn't, now, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... himself by entering the ring of political conflict again; the chances for personal loss were great. His enemies, his critics, and his political adversaries would have it that he was eaten up with ambition, that he came back from his African and European trip eager to thrust himself again into the limelight of national political life and to demand for himself again a great political prize. But his friends, his associates, and those who, knowing him at close range, understood him, realized that this was no picture ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... by this political agitation. The peasantry knew little or nothing of its existence. The land-owners feared it, for, having themselves for the most part kept aloof from modern education, and shrinking instinctively from the limelight of political controversies and such electioneering competitions as they had already been drawn into for municipal and local government purposes, they felt themselves hopelessly handicapped in a struggle that threatened ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... we skip. Probably—nay, certainly—Nature knows best, and is quite well aware what she is up to, and it is perhaps not meant that we should put her in the limelight in her grisly moods. Suffice it to say that Gulo seemed to stop at length, simply because even he could not "see red" forever, and with exhaustion returned sense, and with sense—in his case—in-born caution. He removed, leaving ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... we in the audience are carried away sometimes by that ringing voice, those gleaming eyes. He has us, this Hero, in the hollow of his hand (to borrow a phrase from the Villain). When the limelight is playing round his brow, and he stands in the centre of the stage with clenched fists, oh! then he has us. "What! Betray my aged mother for filthy gold!" he cries, looking at us scornfully as if it was our suggestion. "Never, while yet breath remains in my body!" What ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne

... Limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died. It seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet, venerable Oxford ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... only a part of what they have done. The finest part will never be known, for it was done in solitary places and in the dark, when special correspondents are asleep in their hotels. There was no limelight on the road between Dixmude and Furnes, or among the blood and straw in the cellar ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair

... argument, and, according to it, they are deluding their customers with false hopes. Bryan says that a combination of free silver, grape juice, and peace will cure all ills, and he gets five hundred dollars a lecture for saying it. Billy Sunday gets thousands of dollars for dragging hell out into the limelight. They are both popular forms of amusement. They divert the mind. Why shouldn't they be paid? There are far worse moving-picture ...
— Best Short Stories • Various

... young girl to her heart as she had Anna E. Dickinson in the past. Rachel, however, had none of Anna's dramatic temperament or love of the limelight, but in her orderly businesslike way was eager to serve Susan, whom she had admired ever since as a child she had heard her speak for woman suffrage in her mother's ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... about it," he went on. "It isn't anything which can be adjusted now. They probably meant well enough. We just happen to be in the limelight." ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... is free, neither from adulation nor hero-worship. He is a poet, sentimentalist, and evangelist for Greater Germany. His book is a collection of incidents, reflections, and conversations, carefully assorted and arranged, so as to allow the limelight to glare on the statuesque figure of a mighty Germanic hero, fresh from ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... in the Gondoliers sings, "No possible probable shadow of doubt, No possible doubt whatever," as to his plain duty; and yet he demands of Heaven a miracle to show him how not to do it. And to this pious request comes an answer (by limelight) which demonstrates once more how the Devil can quote Scripture to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various

... placed Mrs. Berry directly in the limelight and she wilted beneath its glare. She reddened and then paled. Her fingers fidgetted with the pin at her throat. She picked up her handkerchief and dropped it. She looked at Elvira and the committee ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... the controls were very familiar to him, and a straight flight, or even a wide circle of the flying ground proper, offered no apparent difficulties. Joe was naturally a shy and retiring lad, and felt that he was very much in the limelight as he climbed into the seat of ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll

... a foot at a time!" shouted the exultant Andy; who thought things could hardly have been better for him, if they were allowed to pass around that stake with their rival trailing in the rear—for surely she would see him there in the limelight, and he was eager to pick Miss Alice out of those many hundreds gathered to cheer the plucky ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy

... have been burned on the ground because the Eastern market was down and the railroads would not make a rate that would allow a profit to the farmer. Such things are not local to California. California is in the limelight just now and such things are ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs



Words linked to "Limelight" :   glare, calcium light, public eye, prominence, theater light, spotlight



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