"Octopus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... This octopus was strong enough to wind a sinuous tentacle about Richard Caramel. The year after his graduation it called him into the slums of New York to muck about with bewildered Italians as secretary to an "Alien Young Men's Rescue Association." He labored at it over ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... anemones, and worms, which he taught the sailors the names of—polycheats and sepunculids, I think he called them. He caught various fishes, including sea-perches, garfish, coralfish, and an eel, a small octopus and a quantity of sponges. Trigger-fish were so abundant that many of them were speared from the ship with the greatest of ease, and Rennick harpooned a couple from a boat with an ordinary dinner ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... landing at Botany Bay, and the dimensions of the tribe among whom Van Bu was held captive were certainly larger than those of the migratory tribes of Australian blacks in more modern times. The "sea spider" described by Van Bu in his second adventure was probably the octopus, which attains to great size in the Pacific. The "hopping animals" are doubtless the kangaroos, with which Australians are ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... different history. We should never forget this. In the records of the methods and results of the control lies the matter, all ready for the competent pen, for an epic of the wheat, the fit third part of the trilogy that Frank Norris began with "The Octopus" and "The Pit" and had, at the call of death, to ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... lifting up the face, and facing God in some mood or moment of briefer or longer duration—this is Hugo's method. In "Toilers of the Sea," Galliatt, by almost superhuman effort, and physical endurance and fortitude and fertility in resource, defeats octopus and winds and rocks and seas, and in lonely triumph pilots the wreck home—and all of this struggle and conquest for love! He is a somber hero, but a hero still, with strength like the strength of ten, since his love is as the love of a legion. The power to do is his, and the nobility to surrender ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... supplies of guns and munitions, while her professors and historians, harnessed to the car of militarism, inflamed the people against England as the jealous enemy of Germany's legitimate expansion. Abroad, like a great octopus, she was fastening the tentacles of permeation and penetration in every corner of the globe, honeycombing Russia and Belgium, France, England and America with secret agents, spying and intriguing ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... Christian, and I can prove it by this magazine. I am an octopus, and a viper, and a vampire, and a man-eating shark. I am what you might call a composite zoo. If you want to get a line on me just read this article on The Shameless Brigand of Bessemer, and you will certainly find out that I am ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... that the New Labor Party is established (and in Chicago recently they polled more votes than the Socialists), we wonder what the old machine will do to combat this new octopus that threatens the big vote that used to belong to 'US.' Answer: Teach the working class real Socialism, the Socialism ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... tall, feathery plumes, as white as snow, or as green as emerald, toss to and fro, and make obeisance to old Neptune. Sea onions, with stems thirty feet long, and bulbous air-filled sacks, reach out their long snaky arms, like an octopus, and woe to the swimmer who becomes ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... Boodah is an octopus whose feelers reach far, and they, within her toils, cannot escape her omnipresence. She sends after them no guns: yet they are blown to atoms; the sea becomes a death-trap thick with pitfalls and shipwreck; one by one they are caught, they fly aloft like startled fowl, or they succumb, and lean, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... on the buttons of his uniform and the other on the desk, he believed himself to look like Napoleon. Like Napoleon he looked straight into my eyes. But his weak and thin fingers were always moving like a small octopus—Napoleon's ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... no work for them to do. In a few seconds the fish was torn asunder and engulfed—those inky eyes the while unwinking and unmoved. A darker, livid hue passed fleetingly over the pallid body of the octopus. Then it slipped back under the shelter of the rock; and the writhing tentacles composed themselves once more to stillness upon the bottom, awaiting the next careless passer-by. Once more they seemed mere inert trailers of weed, not worth the notice of fish or crab. And soon the anemones ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Hugo's credulity may be mentioned, for it was astonishing in a man of such colossal genius. He believed in the most incredible things, as the "Man in the Iron Mask," the twin brother of Louis XIV; in the octopus that has no mouth and feeds itself through its arms; and in the reality of the Japanese sirens which the Japanese were said to make out of an ape and a fish. He had some excuse for the sirens as the Academie des Sciences believed in ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... the affectionate embrace of the many-armed Octopus was not to be desired; and that a thicket of seaweed is a good hiding-place from a chance enemy, and is apt to contain many delicious tidbits in the way of fish food. He knew the manners and habits of the many brilliant-hued fish who live in Coral-Land; and he knew that the ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... a specific illustration. The octopus, or devil-fish, belongs to a widely different class of animals from a true fish; and yet its eye, in general appearance, looks wonderfully like the eye of a true fish. Now, Mr. Mivart pointed to this fact as a great difficulty ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... out of the square and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice called ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... for old Miss Pollie Bumpus? She live all by herself, and she 'bout a million years old, and Doctor Sanford ain't never brung her no chillens 'cause she ain't got 'er no husban' to be their papa, and she got a octopus in her head, and she poor as a post and deaf as ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... separated but compact battalions. Some, as the sound of a human footstep warns them of danger, rush for safety among the submerged clefts and crevices of their temporary retreat, only to be mercilessly and fatally enveloped by the snaky, viscous tentacles of the ever-lurking octopus, for every hole and pool among the rocks contains one or more ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... were around Snap, like the tentacles of an octopus, and Snap was struggling, fighting. We had not intended this at this time, ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... blasfemo. oatmeal : grio, avenfaruno. oats : aveno. object : objekto, ajxo, (aim) celo. oblige : devigi; fari komplezon. observe : rimarki; vidi, observi. obstinate : obstina. obstruct : bari, obstrukci. obtain : ricevi, akiri, havigi al si. occasion : okazo, okazigi. occur : okazi. octopus : okpiedulo. off : for, de. offend : ofendi. offence : ofendo, kulpo, peko. offer : propono. office : ofico, oficejo, kontoro. officer : oficisto, (milit.) oficiro. officiate : funkcii; dejxori; servi kiel. offspring ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... in the centre of this front line was the Kangaroo Marines. Covering the whole advance was a screen of men, and in front of the screen, little patrols with scouts ahead. When all were in the position the G.O.C. signalled "Advance." An army on the move is a fascinating sight. It is like an octopus—the main body with a thousand tendrils, or arms, thrown out. These recoil as they touch the enemy, telling the brain that ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... the outpost among the rocks a hundred yards away. Grief was squatted over a small fire, broiling a strip of shark-flesh. The last twenty-four hours had been lucky. Seaweed and sea urchins had been gathered. Tehaa had caught a shark, and Mauriri had captured a fair-sized octopus at the base of the crevice where the dynamite was stored. Then, too, in the darkness they had made two successful swims for water before the tiger sharks had nosed ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... divided into panels, as in the preceding case; the figures are simple and geometric. The inside of the upright portion of the wall is decorated with vertical lines and bands and the bottom is covered with an octopus-like ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... proclaimed Ben, who had joined the group as the monster vanished, "some calls 'em octopus, but devil-fish is a better word, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... in Naples. There are even sharks and squids. When a squid (an octopus) devours some animals it's ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... order of the Cephalopods, to which belong the cuttle-fish and the octopus (sacred to Victor Hugo), may be, for all we can say to the contrary, an order with a future. Their kindred, the Gastropods, have, in the case of the snail and slug, learnt the trick of air-breathing. And not improbably there are even now genera of this order that have escaped the naturalist, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Just about the level of the top spars of the Ocean Pioneer, whack! I came against something sinking down, and a boot knocked in front of my helmet. Then something else, struggling frightful. It was a big weight atop of me, whatever it was, and moving and twisting about. I'd have thought it a big octopus, or some such thing, if it hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses don't wear boots. It was all in a moment, of course. I felt myself sinking down again, and I threw my arms about to keep steady, and the whole lot rolled free of ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Hampton decided to go to Texas and New Mexico as the representative of a group of "independent" oil operators engaged in a bitter war with the Oil Trust known as the "Octopus," Jack begged so hard to be permitted to go along that his father let him quit Harrington Hall Military Academy two months before ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... wall which inclosed its great area extending over ten acres and gave it so much of its solemn dignity was thirty-five feet high and some seven feet thick. The prison proper, which was not visible from the outside, consisted of seven arms or corridors, ranged octopus-like around a central room or court, and occupying in their sprawling length about two-thirds of the yard inclosed within the walls, so that there was but little space for the charm of lawn or sward. The corridors, forty-two feet wide ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... description of the general form, tells us of the body and fins, of the eight arms with their rows of suckers, of the abnormal position of the head. He points out the two long arms of Sepia and of the calamaries, and their absence in the octopus; and he tells us, what was only confirmed of late, that with these two long arms the creature clings to the rock and sways about like a ship at anchor. He describes the great eyes, the two big teeth forming the beak; and he dissects the whole structure of the gut, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Wickersham, many prosecutions were going forward, and in some cases the legislation begun by Roosevelt was extended and made more effective. I speak now as to the general course of Mr. Taft's Administration and not specially of the events of 1910. In spite of this continuation of the battle with the Octopus—as the Big Interests, Wall Street, and Trusts were indiscriminately nicknamed—the public did not believe that Mr. Taft and his assistants pushed the fight with their whole heart. Perhaps they were misjudged. Mr. Taft being in no sense a spectacular person, whatever he did would lack the spectacular ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... ulterior motive in Evan Blount's appointment and its acceptance. Blenkinsop, the leader-writer on The Plainsman, took a half-column in which to point out in emphatic and vigorous Western phrase the dangers that threatened the commonwealth in this very evident coalition of the railroad octopus and the machine. ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... against the gray branches, outstretched like the lean arms of Macbeth's weird women across her path. Finally Polly Sims succeeded in catching Bobby Jones, whom she clutched with the tenacity of an octopus; and then came the reign of Bobby Jones, who was an expert at the game, and who kept the whole party on the qui vive by his serpentine windings and twistings ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the fairy-tale is bad enough, but, for evil looks, the Octopus is worse still. With his tough, brownish skin, knobbed like the toad's back, his large staring eyes, his parrot's beak, and ugly bag of a body, the Octopus is a horrid-looking creature. Add to this eight long arms twisting and writhing ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... the malignant Occult Elements); all destructive animals; (i.e. reptiles such as the teleosaurus, steneosaurus, etc.; birds, such as the ptereodactyl, vulture, eagle, etc.; mammals, such as the cave lion, cave tiger, etc.; fish, such as the shark, octopus, etc.); and all ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... was hidden by a valance of white dimity, garnished with wide cotton fringe. Over this spacious place of repose, a patchwork quilt of the "rising sun" pattern displayed its gaudy rays, resembling some sprawling octopus, rather than ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... horrible thing beneath the dim sky-light? Dick's electric torch was failing, and we could not see distinctly, and a very oppression of fear seized upon us both. What was the gruesome object in front that resembled a dead octopus with decayed ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... Farmer scowled at the octopus that sprawled on his living-room couch, rubbed his stubbly jaw with a stubby fist, and said, "I ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... journey, and they were a long time shaking off the octopus-like tentacles of the great city, that reached further and further into he country each year, as if it lived on consuming the green fields. Morris walked ahead with the boy on his back, and his ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... with a hare-lip, jumped up from the main-hatch where he was squatting and came aft, his hideous red lips twisting and squirming like the tentacles of an octopus as he masticated a mouthful of betel-nut. Taking the pipe and tobacco from his master he sat down cross-legged beside the companion. Barry eyed him for an instant with anger and disgust. He returned the look with an impertinent grin, and then coolly spat out a stream of the acrid scarlet ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... wanted to see anything quite so badly as I wanted to see an octopus at Theoule. Octopus hunting surpasses gathering four-leaf clovers and fishing as an occupation in which hope eternal plays the principle role. I gradually abandoned other pursuits, and sat smoking on rocks by the half day, excusing indolence on the ground of the thrilling ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... reverse control. The force was now fully repelling. Still the billowing whiteness drew nearer. It boiled and bubbled with the ferocity of one of the hot lava cauldrons of Mercury. Changing shape rapidly, it threw out long streamers that writhed and twisted like the arms of an octopus. Reaching. Searching ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... the young inventor hoarsely. "It's some other monster. It has only five arms—an octopus has eight! I've got to ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... his appreciation of her insistent sincerity. "Well, when you're married won't you be with me all the time? So that's fixed! And as for meeting somebody by accident on the street-cars—why, you foolish darling, you're not marrying a Turk, or an octopus—but an American." ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Caldew locked the door behind him and placed the key in his pocket. When they reached the entrance hall Colwyn paused outside the door of the recess where the housekeeper lurked, like an octopus in a pool. At Colwyn's knock a white face, topped by a white cap, came into view through the narrow slit in the curtained glass half of the door, and swam towards them in the interior gloom after the manner of the head of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... picture obsessed me. It clung with an octopus-like grip to my soul. I truly found trouble and sorrow, intensified by the consciousness of perfect helplessness to grapple with such a vast area of evil. It was world-wide, and whatever the remedy, it ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... builded for himself A monument of quicksand limed with blood; Horse-leech Marat, blear-eyed, vile vulture born; Fair Charlotte's dagger robbed the guillotine! Black-biled, green-visaged, traitorous Robespierre, That buzzard-beaked, hawk-taloned octopus Who played with pale poltroonery of men, And drank the cup of flattery till he reeled; Hell's pope uncrowned, immortal for a day. Tinville, relentless dog of murder-plot— Doom-judge whose trembling victims were foredoomed; Maillard who sucked his milk from Murder's ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... displaying his zeal and patriotism. Moreover, he had no pay, and apparently no power and no duties. He was neither a Governor nor a Government, but a kind of forerunner of approaching empire—one of those harmless and far-reaching tentacles which the British octopus extends into the recesses of ocean, searching for prey to satisfy the demands of her ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... fantastic Clistoyucca arborescens, or Joshua tree, being more in harmony with the archaic landscape than any other plant there. As the traveller crosses one of the open forests of this tree, which is often twenty-five feet high, the more distant ones appear to beckon like some uncanny desert octopus yearning to draw him within reach of those scrawny arms. The blossom of this monstrous growth is a revelation, so unexpected is it. A group as large as one's head, pure white, on the extremity of a dagger-covered bough, it is like an angel amidst bayonets. ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... splinter world-old forests with my laugh, And whirl the ancient snows of Hecla sheer into Orion's eyes. I dance on the deep under the big Indian stars, And wrap the water spout about my sinuous hips As a dancer winds her girdle. The ocean's horrid crew, The octopus, the serpent, and the shark, with the heart of a coward, Plunge downward when they hear my feet above on the sea-floor, And hide in their slimy coverts. Brave men pray upon the straining decks Till comes my mood to end them, and I strew the racing ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... trochosphere of the giant octopus, the devil fish of Indian Ocean legend, multiplied a thousand times," he replied. "When the octopus lays its eggs, they hatch out into the larval form. The free swimming larva is known as a trochosphere, and I am positive that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... "A", to take away from art its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion, pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a phase of dissipation in itself: To release art from the disease of little theatre-ism, and from the mandibles of the octopus-like worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism within range, disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon the consciousness of the not at all stupid public, with ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... this State, owing to the fact that hitherto grain cargoes have been acceptable to ship only as sacked grain, because of claimed danger of shifting cargo and disaster during the long voyage around the Horn. A novel by Frank Norris, entitled the "Octopus," describes a man being killed by smothering in a grain elevator at Port Costa, but there never was an elevator at that point, and consequently there never was a man killed by getting under the spout thereof. Answering specifically ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... at calves, thoroughly entangling and impeding progress. Panting and struggling the firemen penetrated only a short way into the mass before they were slowed almost to a standstill. From the sidelines it seemed as though they were wrestling with an invisible octopus. Feet were lifted high, but never free of the twining vegetation; the ladder was pulled angrily forward, but the clutch of the grass upon it became firmer with ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... had to deal at length with the duty of the Corinthians in view of the way in which every meal was a sacrifice to some god, and how the same permeation of life with religion is found in all these 'false faiths.' The octopus has coiled its tentacles round the whole body of its victim. Bad and sad and mad as idolatry is, it reads a rebuke to many of us, who keep life and religion quite apart, and lock up our Christianity in our pews ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... pictures and film illusions in mind have proclaimed that the fairy tale with its magic wonders ought to be its chief domain, as no theater stage could enter into rivalry. How many have enjoyed "Neptune's Daughter"—the mermaids in the surf and the sudden change of the witch into the octopus on the shore and the joyful play of the watersprites! How many have been bewitched by Princess Nicotina when she trips from the little cigar box along the table! No theater could dare to imitate such raptures of imagination. Other writers have insisted on the superb ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... was octopus, or ink-fish, the favourite food of the sperm whale. I would rather have kept to the bread-fruit and rice; but Oliver was not so particular, and took a little with some red pepper. On his pronouncing it very good, I followed his example, and found ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... what it was to be poor—as Annie Johns had been. She understood what it would mean to lack your tram-fare on a rainy morning—according to Mr. Strachey this was the motor impulse of the thefts—because a lolly shop had stretched out its octopus arms after you. She could imagine, too, with a shiver, how easy it would be, the loss of the first pennies having remained undiscovered, to go on to threepenny-bits, and from these to sixpences. More particularly since the money had been taken, without exception, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... line attached—then he makes a lightning-like dart, and vanishes in an instant with the morsel between his strong, thick jaws. If, however, he sees the most tempting bait—a young yellow-tail, a piece of white and red octopus tentacle, or a small, silvery mullet—and detects even a fine silk line attached to the cleverly hidden hook, he makes a stern-board for a foot or two, still eyeing the descending bait; then, with languid contempt, he slowly turns away, and ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... restrained by a sense of the prodigious length and breadth of the contest, by the fact, at last patent to the most unthinking, that the war is an octopus which has wound its tentacles about every limb and every organ of the vitality of France. A revelation of the overwhelming violence of enormous masses of men has broken down the tradition of chivalry. War is now accepted with a sort of indifference, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... find herself in the grasp of a horrible octopus, from which she did not escape for three generations, and only then at the loss ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... flowers without blossom were as varied as the colours. On the rocky slopes adhered tiny anemonae; lower down were other bushy weeds growing in all forms and positions, while further away in the deeper water rose up great feathery fronds and waving arms, like the tentacles of some giant octopus feeling for its prey. This bed of snake-like brown arms was a weird spot, which only wanted a mermaid or two to make it complete; but I, as a mere man, could only complete the picture by magnifying in my mind's eye the innumerable fishes which swam in and out among the ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... thinker. Sometimes, as in the case of a vigorous thinker or speaker, these thought-form bombs will be seen to explode when they reach the aura of the person addressed or thought of. Other forms appear like nebulous things resembling an octopus, whose twining tentacles twist around the person ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... of a nation at war? It is a monster, composed of many myriads of conglomerated lives, of lives that are distinct and conflicting, lives that move in all directions and are yet joined at the base like the tentacles of an octopus.... It is a confused mingling of all the instincts, and of all the reasons, and of all the unreasons.... Blasts of wind from the abyss; sightless and raging forces issuing from the seething depths of animalism; ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... behind, yet by the time we reached him in answer to his shouts, already he was engulfed up to his middle and going down so rapidly that in another minute he would have vanished altogether. Well, we got him out but not with ease, for that mud clung to him like the tentacles of an octopus. After this we were ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... heads into crevices in the rocks. I should like to have reasoned with them, for they evidently thought they were hidden, while, in fact, they were wriggling upside down, full in view. Well, so then we went to see the octopus. One was just like a pink satin bag, covered with large ivory buttons, but that was only because it was inside out. While I was watching it I rather started, for I saw in a corner of the den close ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... wrestled swiftly, rapturously, intent and mindless at last, two essential white figures working into a tighter closer oneness of struggle, with a strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs in the subdued light of the room; a tense white knot of flesh gripped in silence between the walls of old brown books. Now and again came a sharp gasp of breath, or a sound ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit: it builds ships and loses money on them: it operates the ships and loses more money: it piles up taxes to fill the ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... than 8 per cent, and outrageous commissions on renewals increased the burden of the farmer. The result was one foreclosure after another. The mortgage shark was identified as the servant of the "Wall Street Octopus," and between them there was little hope for the farmer. In Kansas, according to a contemporary investigator,* "the whole western third of the State was settled by a boom in farm lands. Multitudes of settlers took claims without means of their own, expecting to pay for the land ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... fear came over me that Alb had knocked his head against something, or got a cramp. But he appeared, spluttering, and announced that he had been cutting the wire through with the chisel. There it was in his hand, a thick, ugly coil, dangerous as an octopus. ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... neared the rocks we saw two figures silhouetted against the rays of the setting sun which proved to be those of Mrs. Glass and her daughter Mrs. Lavarello. We did not succeed in catching anything, but Mrs. Lavarello gave us her catch of three crawfish and two small fish. She caught an octopus, which they call cat-fish, horrid-looking creatures:—how she could handle them I ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... came no answer. I set my teeth, and struggled to free myself until the veins in my forehead were knotted and my bonds cut into the flesh. But, alas! I was held as in the tentacles of an octopus. Every limb was gripped, so that already a numbness had overspread them, while my senses ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... Fractions; but aside from their table-manners and general behavior, which were shocking, Sara thought they looked even worse than the proper ones. For one of them had two faces, another three feet, and a third one had as many arms as an octopus. Sara positively ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... over that she might read his eyes, but Keith turned his face away. In the shock of what he had just learned, he was, at the moment, not the lover; he was the small cattleman who is being forced out of the business by the octopus of combined capital. It was not less bitter that the woman he loved was one of the tentacles reaching out to crush him. And they could do it; they—the whole affair resolved itself into a very simple scheme, to Keith. The gauntlet had been thrown down—because ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... large sketch-book which I regretted taking almost as soon as we started, we set out on our quest of Dantesque scenery. At first our road ran along the quays by the river side. A camouflaged Admiralty oiler was loading fuel oil by means of three pipes that looked like the tentacles of an octopus clutching on to the side of the ship. Near this quay was a gate, and we entered the wire fence that surrounds the works and the area of the tanks and struck out ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels, or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe. The man who should write a dialogue between two early Christians might be a mere writer of dialogues. But a man who should write a dialogue between an early Christian and the Missing Link would have to be ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... small town near Paris told me that she had heard these women say more than once they didn't care how long the war lasted; owing to the prevalence of the alcoholism octopus which has fastened itself on France of late years the men often beat their wives as brutally as the low-class Englishmen, and this vice added to the miserliness of their race made their sojourn in the trenches a welcome relief. Of course these were the exceptions, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... complained, "here has been me coming through the watery deep all the way from Broadway, with an octopus clinging to each arm and a dolphin on my back, and you don't even ask how I stood the trip. And do you realize that it's sheer madness for the five of us to ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... had entered into full possession, had perched itself in the centre of consciousness, and seemed to Flint's excited nerves to be working its octopus claws in and out among the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... his adversary was weakening under the strain. Blind terror began to grip Tom Blair. At first a mere suggestion, then a horrible certainty, possessed him as to the identity of the relentless being who opposed him. Again the other's hand, like the creeping tentacle of an octopus, sought his throat, would not be stayed. He struggled with all his might against it, until it seemed the blood-vessels of his neck would burst, but still the hold tightened. He clutched at the long fingers desperately, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... very glad to hear it," Cheiron said heartily. "I never like to see a fine ship going upon the rocks. All your vitality would have been drawn out of you by those octopus arms." ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... the Chesapeake Bay "looks like the deck plan of an octopus," but the mental image created by the phrase tells but a fraction of the story. Rivers and creeks empty into the bay by the dozens, and every river, and most of the creeks, have tributaries. Even some of the tributaries have tributaries. The result is thousands of miles of navigable ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... and Speller, Ray's Arithmetics and Harvey's Grammars. Most of these met with acceptance and this was so full and universal throughout the central West as to give opportunity to the competing agents of other houses to honor Van Antwerp, Bragg & Co. with such titles as "Octopus" and "Monopoly," names that were used before "Trusts" were invented. They also called the firm in chosen companies, "Van Anteup, Grabb & Co." These were mere playful or humorous titles in recognition of the fact that ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... occasion I conceived a dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles long in various directions—little rows and single and double cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof. These square red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... advertisement. Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrity when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves. They are at the beginning of a series of small worries, thunderbolts hidden under flowers, but they know how to hold in check that monster advertisement. It is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out on the right and on the left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in through its thousand little inhaling organs all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public when it ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... key to the workings of the P. A. of America. When one begins to know something about the patent medicine evil, his sense of justice immediately asks why "something" has not been done to crush it. When the reader understands more about this octopus, he will learn that its tentacles are far-reaching and that it has a mysterious and efficient way of crushing in its incipiency any embryo movement directed against it. It would be a long story to give the facts in detail—they are all a matter of record—the easiest way to explain ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... cursed again, for the tenth time, and stood uncertainly in the dimness. From tall, moss-shrouded trees, wrist-thick vines hung quietly, scraping the spongy ground like the tentacles of some monstrous tree-bound octopus. Fitful little plants grew straggly in the shadows of the mossy trunks, forming a dense underbrush that made walking difficult. At midday some few of the blue sun's rays filtered through to the jungle floor, but now, late afternoon on the planet, the shadows ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... the tug you could see the dust of the street rise in answering clouds to the assaults of many feet. Then, quite suddenly, the wide swing-doors of the bar flapped back. A golden gleam burst on the night and seemed to vomit a slithering mass of men which writhed and rolled like an octopus. Then you heard the collapsible gates run to their sockets with a glad clang, and ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... 8th.—When the Ministry of Health Bill was in the Commons some objection was raised to the multiplicity of powers conferred upon it. But if certain noble lords could have their way the measure would become a veritable octopus, stretching its absorptive tentacles over all the Departments of State. It would take over the inspectorship of factories from the Home Office, the control of quack medicines from the Privy Council and the relief of the poor from the Local Government Board. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and landed him all in a heap in the coal. Then he climbed up on the right-hand side of the cab and took charge of things himself. There were myriads of tracks stretching out before him like the long arms of some giant octopus, but all traffic was suspended on account of the strike and the main line was clear. The train flew down the line like a scared rabbit and in thirty minutes reached the camp at Blake Park. I had arrived there that morning ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... his memory, concerning his part in the affray, but to his dismay he found that Sheeley had already been summoned to the office of the prosecuting attorney. In every direction he turned he encountered the octopus of the law. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... late," said the leader of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang of train robbers, with a sigh. "I should be out-classed if I went into Wall street now. I have got many of the elements in my make up of the successful financier, and the oil octopus, and if I had not become a train robber I might have been a successful insurance president, but I have always been handicapped by a conscience. I could not rob widows and orphans if I tried. It would give me a pain that medicine would not cure to know that women and children were crying ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... when the Sandjack of Novi-Bazar was threatened with the fate which seemed to have already overtaken Bosnia and Herzegovina; when gallant little Montenegro was already shut out from the sea by the octopus-like grip of Dalmatia crouching along her western shore; when Turkey was dwindling down to almost ineptitude; when Greece was almost a byword, and when Albania as a nation—though still nominally subject—was of such unimpaired virility that there were great possibilities ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like a great wooden octopus, it ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... animals were also divided by Aristotle into five classes—namely: (1) Cephalopoda (the octopus, cuttle-fish, etc.); (2) weak-shelled animals (crabs, etc.); (3) insects and their allies (including various forms, such as spiders and centipedes, which the modern classifier prefers to place by themselves); (4) hard-shelled animals (clams, oysters, snails, etc.); ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... I am leading with the ogre of the King's wrath forever hanging over me; Prince George's intrigues, octopus-like, ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... distortion &c 243; squalor &c (uncleanness) 653. forbidding countenance, vinegar aspect, hanging look, wry face, spretae injuria formae [Vergil]. [person who is ugly] eyesore, object, witch, hag, figure, sight, fright; monster; dog [Coll.], woofer [Coll.], pig [Coll.]; octopus, specter, scarecrow, harridan^, satyr^, toad, monkey, baboon, Caliban, Aesop^, monstrum horrendum informe ingens cui lumen ademptum [Lat.] [Vergil]. V. be ugly &c adj.; look ill, grin horribly a ghastly smile, make faces. render ugly &c adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... single-peak glacier system whose equal has not yet been discovered. Twenty-eight living glaciers, some of them very large, spread, octopus-like, from its centre. It is four hours by rail or motor ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... too late, for two Spanish galleons ranged alongside and swung grappling irons into his rigging in order to close with the moving vessel. The Englishmen struck at them with oars and hand-spikes, knocking the tentacles of the on-coming octopus aside, and, with sails flying and shots rattling, the Judith bore ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... forgetfulness, sublime moments of peace to enjoy a kiss in; but we are expected to be home to dinner at seven, and to say and do nothing that might shock the neighbours. Respectability has wound itself about society, a sort of octopus, and nowhere are you quite free from one of its horrible suckers. The power of the villa residence is supreme: art, science, politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... particularly attracted by their white appearance. They take it, perhaps, to be some marble hall erected for their accommodation; so in they swim, big and little squid equally beguiled! How the whale's mouth must water when he feels a fine huge juicy octopus playing about his tongue! Up goes the lower jaw like a trap-door, and cephalapods, small and large, find their bright marble palace turned into a dark, black prison, from which there is no return; for, giving a turn with his tongue, he gulps them all down with a smack which must ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... flounders. Sometimes a great lobster would give the net such tweaks that they guessed his presence before they saw him. And sometimes it happened that the catch was nothing but a few sea crabs, who would half devour the other unfortunate fish imprisoned with them. Another day a great octopus appeared, and Esperance grew pale with fright at sight ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... the tendrils of the octopus around Black Bill,' says I. And then I told him about the deputy sheriff, and how I'd described him to the deputy, and what the deputy ...
— Options • O. Henry
... A score or more Of guests," the hostess said, "We'll have the Poodle Sing Yankee Doodle, A-standing on his head. And when this through, Good Parrot, you, Please show them how you swear." "Oh, dear; don't cuss," Cried the Octopus, And he walked off on ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... shoot the handsome 'Deserta petrels,' the cagarras (Puffinus major, or sheerwater), the rabbits, the goats that have now run wild, and possibly a seal. A poisonous spider is here noticed by the guide-books, and the sea supplies the edible pulvo (octopus) and the dreaded urgamanta. This huge ray (?) enwraps the swimmer in its mighty double flaps and drags him to the bottom, paralysing him by the wet shroud and the dreadful stare ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... was not one of Caesar's achievements. But from the moment when his covetous eagle-eye viewed the chalk-cliffs of Dover from the coast of Northern Gaul, its fate was sealed. The Roman octopus from that moment had fastened its tentacles upon the hapless land; and in 45 A.D., under the Emperor Claudius, it became a Roman province. In vain did the Britons struggle for forty years. In vain did the heroic Boadicea (during the reign of Nero, 61 A.D.), like Hermann in Germany, and Vercingetorix ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... blinding glory. The heat of the rays seemed to burn them; there was a prickling pleasantness to it now, as they looked at the mighty sea of flame through smoked glasses. The vast arms of the corona reached out like the tentacles of some fiery octopus through thousands of miles of space—huge arms of flaming gas that writhed out as though to reach and drag back the whirling planets to the parent body. All about the mighty sphere, stretching far into space, a wan ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... Clark's invasion of the State of Michigan made more impression on the people of St. Marys than any other of his activities, even though it came in the midst of great undertakings. Here was the definite impression of a central power that stretched octopus arms from out of their own town. Even Manson, who was recognized as the champion pessimist, seemed impressed. But St. Marys remained for the most part still inactive. The people looked on, admired the works, ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan |
