"Octopus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Mr. Chester. A young giant with a grip like an octopus. 'The fairest ornament of her sex.' Never, never heard of him before. Some old flame of Dorothy's, who has discovered her whereabouts and brazenly followed ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... sought out Sheeley, confident of being able to jog 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 ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... convinced that your friend is none other than the picturesque and romantic criminal whose octopus hand is upon almost every great theft in Europe, and whom the police always fail to catch, so ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... only uttering the pious wish that the devil was dead," answered Cornelius; "—boiled like an octopus! ha! ha! ha!" ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... out, and 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 a materialized ghost in ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Farmer scowled at the octopus that sprawled on his living-room couch, rubbed his stubbly jaw with a stubby fist, ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... said my companion to me. "This company is a part of the United States Steel Corporation, and in the old muckraking days it was thoroughly raked. They think that we have come down here full of passionate feeling over the poor, downtrodden workingman and the great, greedy octopus." ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... it 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 it far ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... On the coast I collected many marine animals, chiefly gasteropodous (I think some new). I examined pretty accurately a Caryopyllia, and, if my eyes are not bewitched, former descriptions have not the slightest resemblance to the animal. I took several specimens of an Octopus which possessed a most marvellous power of changing its colours, equalling any chameleon, and evidently accommodating the changes to the colour of the ground which it passed over. Yellowish green, dark brown, and red, were the prevailing colours; this fact appears to be new, as far ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Various forms and classes of Thought Forms. Full description of their character, appearance and effect. Thought Form whirls and swirls. Rotation Thought Forms. Thought Form whirlpools. Explosive Thought Forms. Thought Form bombs. Octopus Thought Form. How Thought Forms are projected and why they travel. A wonderful study of ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... of his mind was turned only on the Western conspirators, and he feared no villainy in the world save the Detroit schemer who had robbed him of his birthright. "By Heavens! I'll give up trade, the service of this greedy octopus. I will go abroad and so escape Worthington's ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... enormous sail was left behind. There was no room for sailing and fishing at the same time in that tiny craft. Several miles away, inside the reef, in a channel twenty fathoms deep, Tehei dropped his baited hooks and rock-sinkers. The bait was chunks of octopus flesh, which he bit out of a live octopus that writhed in the bottom of the canoe. Nine of these lines he set, each line attached to one end of a short length of bamboo floating on the surface. When a ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... 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
... on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like a great wooden octopus, it spread ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... 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 folds of ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... and carbonaceous interiors into silicones for themselves. When silicone tissue is metabolized, the carbon and hydrogen go to CO{2} and H{2}O, which are breathed out, while the silicone goes into SiO{2}, which is deposited as more teeth and armor. (Compare the terrestrial octopus, which makes armor-plating out of calcium urate instead of excreting urea or uric acid.) The animals can, of course, eat each other too, or make a meal of the small carbonaceous ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... "Maybe the octopus won't hurt her," I offered. "They say that most of the stories of their ferocity ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... standing like a scaled tower a hundred feet above the rift, its eyes scanning that movement I had seen along the course of its lair. There was a hissing; the crown of horns fell, whipped and writhed like the tentacles of an octopus; the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... over an eight-armed octopus even: so am merely a very helpless loving nonentity which merges itself most happily in you, and begs to be lifted to no pedestal at all, ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... feel sorry 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 job's ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... made the earthquake, the volcano, the cyclone; the shark, the viper, the tiger, the octopus, the poison berry; and the deadly loathsome germs of cholera, consumption, typhoid, smallpox, and the black death. God has permitted famine, pestilence, and war. He has permitted martyrdom, witch-burning, slavery, massacre, torture, and human ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... baroness crashed sentence upon sentence, in retort, springing up with the combative instinct of a beast, to make discord of the stuff she read, and deride it. Twice she went over the lines with this defensive accompaniment; then they laid octopus-limbs on her. The writing struck chill as a glacier cave. Oh, what an answer to that letter of fervid respectfulness, of innocent supplication for maternal affection, for some ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... succeeded to the throne of their father; and the portions of Constantine II, the eldest of the three, and Constans, the youngest, have at last fallen into the hands, or the web, of Constantius,—a sort of cross between a spider, an octopus, and an elderly maiden aunt,—and in general about as unpleasant a creature as ever sat on a throne. Constantine the Great, indeed, had willed the succession into the hands of a much larger number of his ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... fellow, scarce opening his mouth except to curse the poor scrub of a maid servant, or to abuse a man who has not paid his score. He slinks in and lights his pipe, smokes it silently, and slinks out again. He is the octopus of the hamlet, fastening on the cottage homes and sucking the life-blood from them. He misses nothing, and nothing comes amiss ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... heart; he is a machine!" said young Denton. "He is simply a human octopus for pulling in money. Not that I object to money," he added, with a laugh, "but I hate to see men make it ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... 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 would have to be universal in its application. This experience seemed to ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... movin' on the wather," exclaimed Mrs Lynch, who, during the occurrences just described, had held on to a belaying pin with the tenacity and strength of an octopus. ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... a 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, for the ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... The 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 ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... much interested, on several occasions, by watching the habits of an Octopus, or cuttle-fish. Although common in the pools of water left by the retiring tide, these animals were not easily caught. By means of their long arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and when ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... 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, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... 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 ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... shores of the lake. Attracted by the cries of pain and terror from his dog, he found the animal held by black sticky bands which had chafed the skin to bleeding point. These bands were branches of a newly-discovered carnivorous plant which had been aptly named the 'land octopus.' The branches are flexible, black, polished and without leaves, and secrete a ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... where the trail crossed there was a mighty sycamore that almost dammed its course. With its gnarled and swollen roots half dug from their crevices by the tumultuous violence of cloudbursts, it clung like an octopus to a shattered reef of rocks and sucked up its nourishment from the water. In the pool formed by its roots the minnows leapt and darted, solemn bull-frogs stared forth from dark holes, and in a natural seat against the huge ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... get my hands on one of these monsters ... superhumanly intelligent fish ... marvelous—akin to the octopus, perhaps?" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... tentacles from which he was dangling shifted their grip slightly, turning Powell's body in the air so that he could look up and get his first glimpse of the thing that had captured him. He shuddered at what he saw. The creature was a hideous combination of octopus and giant bat. ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... We want tumult and war to give us 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 ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... here again within a month or two? If not, I wish you would write me all the news of the Guardian and all about the great legal fight which you and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are waging against the octopus. I try to keep in touch with it through Uncle Silas, who of course is intensely interested and who seems another man of late, but he has not your gift of explaining in words of one syllable. Have you ever thought of getting out a textbook of ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... 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 ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... of Chicago he is pretty apt to hear of Yerkes. Yerkes owns all of the north side street railways and is a dictator in a dozen enormous enterprises. It is the fashion to regard Yerkes as an octopus who has Chicago grasped in his strangling arms. It is the custom to hurl abuse at Yerkes and hold Yerkes responsible for all the many ills of the city. In the popular mind Yerkes is the Chicago exemplar of the grasping, soulless, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Remember how Paul 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
... replacing him by some one agreeable to General Grant; but all in vain. This official "old man of the sea" kept his seat on the Presidential neck, never closing crafty eye nor traitorous mouth, and holding on with the tenacity of an octopus. ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... disguise its deadly character under a beautiful exterior like the stinging fish of Micronesia, which I have described above. The nofu which is also met with on the coasts of Australia, is a devil undisguised, and belongs to the angler family. Like the octopus or the death-adder (Acanthopis antarctica) of Australia, he can assimilate his colour to his environment. His hideous wrinkled head, with his staring goggle eyes, are often covered with fine wavy ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke
... demon of Kali Ghatta, was hovering above them in the pestilential air as the carriage swiftly rolled along the superb streets of the metropolis born of Governor Charnock's settlement in sixteen eighty-six. The gift of an Emperor of Delhi to the ambitious English, Fort William had grown to be an octopus of modern splendor. Down the circular road, past the splendid Government House, they silently sped through the "City of Palaces." Berthe Louison never noted the varied delights of the Maiden Esplanade, nor, even with a glance ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the National Portrait Gallery was in the form of a lecture entitled "Portraiture Past and Present." I found the subject so large, so complicated, I may say so octopus-like, embracing such varied periods and phases, and throwing forth its arms or ramifications in so many directions, that I soon discovered I was struggling with a monster subject, with which it was impossible to grapple completely ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... scientific aloofness and asked if she had the slightest conception of what "this is worth?" She hadn't, and she went to bed. It was only another one of his gestures which was responsible for these weird dreams. That night she dreamed Ronald brought home a giant octopus which insisted on doing the dishes for her. In the morning she woke up ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... 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 wife followed. Neither spoke, and the sick lad did not complain. ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... new and strange to us, whose odd Brazilian names would convey to a stranger but little idea of the fish themselves. There was an enormous rock fish, weighing about three hundred pounds, with hideous face and shiny back, and fins; large ray, and skate, and cuttle fish—the octopus, or pieuvre, described with so much exaggeration in Victor Hugo's "Travailleurs de la Mer," to say nothing of the large prawns for which the coast is famous—prawns eight or ten inches long, with antennae of twelve or fourteen inches in length. Such prawns suit those only who care for ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... Octopus," deals with the war between the wheat grower and the Railroad Trust; the second, "The Pit," is the fictitious narrative of a "deal" in the Chicago wheat pit; while the third, "The Wolf," will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a famine ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... 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 |
