"Tarantula" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is in the house, and is meditating a purchase, should he see a tarantula (such as are very common in that country) on the wall, provided it advances from a quarter that he deems lucky, he will complete his purchase at once; but if it comes from a quarter that he considers unlucky he will not do ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... meeting of the National Librarians' Association. While the train bearing the excursionists was en route through Arizona, a stop of twenty minutes was made one evening for supper at a rude eating-house, and here Dr. Poole had an exciting experience with a tarantula. The venomous reptile attacked the kindly old gentleman with singular voracity, and but for the high-topped boots which Mr. Poole wore, serious injuries would have been inflicted upon our friend's person. Mr. Fred Hild, our Public Librarian, hearing Dr. Poole's cries ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... investigation can be found. Among others the Arabesque, Chinese fret, Circle, Comb, various forms of the Cross, Mina Khani, Octagon, the S form, Scroll, Serrated leaves, Shah Abbas, the Star,—six or eight pointed,—the Tarantula, Triangle, the Y form, and ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... tarntula; the tarantula is a kind of spider, taking its name from the city of Taranto in southern Italy. Tradition, which modern science cannot corroborate, has it that the bite of the tarantula produces a sort of sleeping sickness known as Tarantism. To rouse ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... propagated by the sight of the sufferers, and for over two centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries. The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy the disease became known as tarantism, it being supposed to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to furnish magical means for exorcising ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... concerning Substances, we are liable to all the former inconveniences: v. g. he that uses the word TARANTULA, without having any imagination or idea of what it stands for, pronounces a good word; but so long means nothing at all by it. 2. He that, in a newly-discovered country, shall see several sorts of animals and vegetables, unknown to him before, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... his agony. The association had been too painful, and in his daily tendance he had somewhat neglected this room and had usually entered the other by the French window from the veranda. Thus, he saw now that a bloated tarantula had established itself in one corner, between wall and ceiling, and an uncanny looking white lizard scuttered across the boards, and disappeared under a piece of furniture, leaving its tail behind. A phenomenon ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... top of her with his head on one side, seemed to conclude that a game of play was to be got out of Sam, and came blundering towards him; but Sam was, by this time, deep in a luxurious rocking-chair, so the puppy stopped half way, and did battle with a great black tarantula spider who happened to ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... begin to talk about love, coz, I shall tumble into such a laughing convulsion that I shall not recover from it for this next three days. Love! that stupid word broke the neck of my famous master, Pietro. But for this tarantula-dance the great hawk-nose would still be sitting as professor at his lecturing desk, and tickling the young goslings with philosophy and wisdom as they perkt up their yellow beaks to catch the crumbs he dropt into them. Marry! old beldam, this monkey-trick of love, this Platonic ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... heat and softness of our blankets. They were unwelcome customers, to be sure; but yet there were some others of which we were still more in dread: among them I may class, as the ugliest and most deadly, the prairie tarantula, a large spider, bigger than a good-sized chicken egg, hairy, like a bear, with small blood-shot eyes ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... man," said Ramiro with a little laugh, "how charming is the prospect that you paint of a midnight row with you upon those lonely waters; the tarantula and the butterfly arm in arm! Mynheer van Goorl, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... of my eyes saw a roadrunner skipping down the hill with a young tarantula in his bill, and the other eye noticed a rabbit-hawk sitting on a dead limb in a water-elm. I popped over one after the other with my forty-five, just to show him. 'Two out of three,' says I. 'Birds just naturally seem to draw my fire ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... nothing could prevail. So he told her wonderful tales of what he had seen and done and been through, and of his daily adventures, and brought to her the occasional results of his single-handed combats with birds and beasts. He offered to dig up a tarantula's nest for her and to catch and tame for her pleasure a side-winder rattlesnake, or, if she preferred, a golden oriole or a mocking-bird. It did n't make any difference to him whether she chose a rattlesnake or an oriole; whatever she ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... nearest coast of New South Wales, no reptiles of any description are to be found; while at Phillip Island, only seven miles from Norfolk Island, several species of reptiles exist in abundance, such as the Centipede, Tarantula, etc. ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... darkness. Very rarely, an enormous spider appears. This creature seems inoffensive. If captured, it will feign death until certain that it is not watched, when it will run away with surprising swiftness if it gets a chance. It is hairless, and very different from the tarantula, or fukurogumo. It is called miyamagumo, or mountain spider. There are four other kinds of spiders common in this neighbourhood: tenagakumo, or 'long-armed spider;' hiratakumo, or 'flat spider'; jikumo, or 'earth spider'; and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... master word of the cult. The rattlesnake is "deadly." The copperhead and moccasin are "deadly." So is the wholly mythical puff adder. In hardly less degree is the tarantula "deadly," while varying lethal capacities are ascribed to the centipede, the scorpion, the kissing-bug, and sundry other forms of insect life. The whole matter is based upon the slenderest foundations. I don't mean, by this, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... it is of interest to learn that the danger to life from bites and stings of poisonous reptiles and insects has been greatly exaggerated. According to popular opinion, anyone bitten by a rattlesnake, gila monster or tarantula is doomed to die, while as a matter of fact the statistics show that only from two to seven per-cent succumb to the effects of the wounds inflicted by ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... offered a tale of a tarantula fight. These bouts were carefully arranged by the cowboys, the scene being set in a deep washbowl. Two females were the combatants, and the one who first amputated all the legs of the other was declared the winner. Occasionally a particularly vicious spider would forsake his ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... to have lost his senses, or to have been bitten by a tarantula. He jumped off the ground half-a-dozen times to thrice his own height, giving a succession of little joyous yelps that resembled a human cachinnation far more than any sounds of canine origin or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Gerard, say that I have been scared. And besides my terror at this horrible attack, and the maddening pain of my wound, there was a sudden feeling of loathing such as you might feel were some filthy tarantula to ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... whom before Great Herschelles had tackled, were not worse Than the Colossal Spider, Albion's curse, The scourge of childish Wealth and youthful Rank, The Moloch of our Minors! Fathers, thank Our new Alcides, who, with legal club, Could dare the web assault, the Spider drub! Worse than Tarantula venom hath the bite Of this Conkiferous Ogre, which to fight Herschelles did adventure! Thump! Bang! Whack! The web is burst, the Spider's on his back, All impotently spluttering poisonous spleen Let's hope such monster may no more be ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... weary trek through the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg walked right into a spider's web with a huge yellow spider gloating in the middle of it, he said he'd been bitten by a tarantula. We told him that we should have to leave him there to die, for we must press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic sweet-fern leaf and came running after us, tripping over his sash. The trekking took a long time, and when we reached the end of the point we were quite ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... and he gave me a liniment to apply. This did no good. In a few days the swelling disappeared except where the spot of keen pain was, and there a lump was left half as large as a man's fist, with two small red spots in the middle of it. I now concluded that these spots marked the bite of a tarantula that must have gotten in my blankets at Shower-Bath Spring. Suppuration set in at the spots where the flesh turned black and all the men said it was a bad-looking wound. They thought I would lose my leg. I concluded to poultice it to draw out any poison that remained, and kept bread-and-milk ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the lariat became apparent to Lennon when he was roused by the chill of dawn. He saw one of the Navahos rake out of the embers of the evening's fire a torpid tarantula as big ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... me, and kill me, if you like," said Mrs. Tarantula to Dick, as they met at the schoolhouse door. "This is a hard world, Dick Adams, and I am about tired of ...
— The Nursery, February 1878, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... Piero, who was of an evil temper, as he freed himself from Trotto's clutches, and looked at the swaying figure before him. "Loose hold, signor! Have you been bitten by a tarantula?" ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... For an already established tubercle requiring rapid action of the blood, such as may well exist among the birds and vertebrates of Jupiter and Saturn, I suggest a hypodermic rattlesnake injection, while hydrocyanic acid and tarantula saliva may also come in well. The combinations that so long destroyed us have already become our panacea." "I see you have these poisons at your fingers' ends," said Ayrault, "and we shall feel the utmost confidence in ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... stout-bodied form of spider with two sharply pointed chelicerae projecting from the conventionalized mouth. These characteristics together with the absence of any web, suggest a large predacious species, probably the tarantula (Tarantula sp.) which is common in Mexico. The acute powers of observation shown by the artist are evinced in this figure since he draws the spider correctly with eight legs instead of the six or ten sometimes seen in drawings by ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... compelled to pursue what not even a mad man would pursue?" "By Hercules," said Xenophon, "what extraordinary power you represent to be in a kiss!" "Do you wonder at this?" rejoined Socrates; "are you not aware that the Tarantula, an insect not as large as half an obolus, by just touching a part of the body with its mouth, wears men down with pain, and deprives them of their senses?" "Yes, indeed," said Xenophon, "but the Tarantula ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... of the tarantula fixes a man's mind on one idea; that is on the thing he was thinking of when ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... of horses, and a low, inarticulate murmur of voices, out in front and a little to the left, gave me fresh hope. Warned by past failures, I thought best to forego the erect posture to which our species owes so much of its majesty. I therefore dropped on all-fours and went like a tarantula till I distinguished two horses walking slowly abreast, jammed together; the riders presenting an indistinct outline of two individuals rolled into one; and it was from this amalgamation that the low, pigeon-like murmurs proceeded. An instinct of delicacy ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... day following that he met the Tarantula, a clever rascal, who had a club that would deal a fatal blow to others, but would not hurt himself. He began to groan as Ta-Vwots drew near, and cried that he had a pain caused by an evil spirit in his head. Wouldn't Ta-Vwots thump it out? Indeed, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... History, used often to say to me, "Respected Herr Receiver, Italy is a beautiful country; the dear God takes care of every one there. You can lie on your back in the sunshine and raisins drop into your mouth; and if a tarantula bites you, you dance with the greatest ease, although you never in your life before learned to dance." "Ay, to Italy! to Italy!" I shouted with delight, and, heedless of any choice of roads, hurried on along the first ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Ho-Pin in the same way that an average man fears a tarantula, and he was only too happy to avoid the ever smiling Chinaman; so that the days passed on, and, finding himself unmolested and the affairs of the catacombs proceeding apparently as usual, he kept his information to himself, uncertain if he shared ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... copper. Though nearly wild with heat and aching bones and muscles and the long hours of wait—wait—wait, I was ashamed to complain, for there sat the old man, still and silent. I routed out a hairy tarantula from under a stone and teased him into a frenzy with my stick, and tried to get up a fight between him and a scallop-backed horned-toad that blinked wonderingly at me. Then I espied a green lizard on a stone. The beautiful reptile was about a foot in length, bright green, dotted with ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... those fashionable epidemics which occasionally attack our youthful population. It wasn't the music mania, nor gymnastic convulsions, nor that wide-spread malady, croquet. Neither was it one of the new dances which, like a tarantula-bite, set every one a twirling, nor stage madness, nor yet that American lecturing influenza which yearly sweeps over the land. No, it was a new disease called the Art fever, and it attacked the young women of the community with ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... hiding-place, he saw no living thing, save a brown lizard (it was of the tarantula species) rustling away through the sunshine. To all present appearance, this venomous reptile was the only creature that had responded to the young Count's efforts to renew his intercourse with the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lacing as a dozen pairs of boots. It has been greatly improved by a new sleeping-bag with straps, and flaps that tuck in at the ends. But the obvious disadvantage of all sleeping-bags is that in rain and mud you are virtually lying on the hard ground, at the mercy of tarantula and fever. ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... selects a spider for its victim, no less than the redoubtable Tarantula, knows that its quarry "has two nervous centres which animate respectively the movements of the limbs and those of the terrible fangs; hence the two ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... to do something to you, Greta, I thought. She's the maniac in the company. She's the one who terrorized you with the boning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you at the dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and the others are covering up for. She's going to smile the devil-smile and weave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And Birnam Wood'll come to Dunsinane and you'll be burnt at the stake by men in armor or drawn ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... from open dishonor only by the timely assistance of the government,—while the trade of England, in spite of the staid and conservative habits of the people, is quite as liable to those terrific tarantula-dances, called revulsions, as our own. Before urging his "restraints," the President ought to have inquired a little into the history of such restraints; and he would then have saved himself from the absurdity of patronizing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that Chink; nobody but me knew how 'e doted on 'im. Couldn't bear 'im out of 'is sight, the derned protoplasm! And w'en 'e came down to this clear-in' one day an' found him an' me neglectin' our work—him asleep an' me grapplin a tarantula out of 'is sleeve—W'isky laid hold of my axe and let us have it, good an' hard! I dodged just then, for the spider bit me, but Ah Wee got it bad in the side an' tumbled about like anything. W'isky was just weigh-in' me out one w'en ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... your coat, but that wasn't Charley Downs; it was the tarantula-juice he'd been imbibing in Omaha. Left alone he's as honest as I am; and here's a run that would trip up a missionary. For instance, leaving Loneville the other night, a man came running alongside ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... can only add a scene of sea sport off Fort Rotterdam, at Macassar, an island between Java and Borneo; shaped like a huge tarantula, a small body, with four disproportionately long legs, which stretch into the sea in narrow and lengthened peninsulas. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... and cobble stones, wild with excitement, twinkling her small white feet beneath me? George laughs out of a cloud of dust, "Give her her head; don't you see she likes it?" and Chu-Chu seems to like it, and, whether bitten by native tarantula into native barbarism or emulous of the roan, "blood" asserts itself, and in a moment the peaceful servitude of years is beaten out in the music of her clattering hoofs. The creek widens to a deep gully. We dive into ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... never let go its clutch on her heart, but a fierceness as of any wild thing at bay was over her. She realized that in another minute, when he should see her, she would gather herself up, and spring, spring as she had read of a tarantula springing; that she would be first before the man, that she would kill him. Something which was almost insanity ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... peculiar view of the duties of property. One might expect her to be content with so dignified and enviable a lot, and to pass tranquil days in coddling the cottagers, patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her crotchet on the national school. But no—she is bitten with the tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family portraits look disdainfully from their ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... earnestly that, in order to stand the climate, it is necessary to keep one's liver afloat—in alcohol. He had contributed to thus preserving the livers and lives of his fellow exiles by the invention of two drinks, of which he was inordinately proud. One he had dubbed "Tarantula Juice;" the other he called "Whisper of Death." He told me that the amateur who took three drinks of the latter would have no further need for his services; the only person whose services he would require would be ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell |
