"Insect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did not fear him,—this creature in gray. She stood stock-still, and stared at him, so near that he could see her wink her starry eyes, with the white rings round them. She stamped one hoof, kicked an insect from her ear with another, snorted again, wheeled around, and at last broke away for the thick shelter of the trees, lightly and swiftly as a breeze which skims ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... this bird could say. Then down he shot, bounced airily along The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again. Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain: How may the death of that dull insect be The life of yon ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... length of pinion, it is both swift and enduring in its flight. When on a rapid course this bird is in the habit of furling its wings into a narrow compass. The greater extent of surface is probably needful for the continual variations of speed and instant stoppages for obtaining its insect food. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... from fermented wine, as the stinging ants, others from the earth, others from the mud, like the frogs, others from slime, as the worms, others from donkeys, as the beetles, others from cabbage, as caterpillars, others from fruit, as the gall insect from the wild figs, others from putrified animals, as bees from bulls, and wasps from horses. Again, of those originating from intercourse of the 42 sexes, some come from animals of the same kind, as in most cases, and others from those of different ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... gathered, with its winged stem, of the smiling primrose of that inimitable tint it only wears in its own woodland nest; and when Allen lighted on a bed of wood-sorrel, with its scarlet stems, lovely trefoil leaves, and purple striped blossoms like insect's wings, she absolutely held her breath in an enthusiasm of reverent admiration. No one can tell the happiness of those four, only slightly diminished by Armine's getting bogged on his way to the golden river ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... motive than fear of present punishment, his goodness cannot be very great. A good man, Charles, always takes delight in conferring happiness on all around him; nor would he offer the smallest injury to the meanest insect that was capable of feeling. 'I am sure,' said the boy, 'I have often seen you kill wasps, and spiders too; and it was but last week that you bought a mouse-trap yourself to catch mice in, although you are so angry now with me.' 'And pray,' resumed his ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... weeks earlier; it will soon fall. The young apples begin to take shape. They show a glow of red on the cheek. They are fuzzy all over. One of them is already injured on one side, having been stung by a curculio or other insect: there are ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... the most widely distributed of Cactuses in the Old World-a circumstance due to their having been introduced for the sake of their edible fruits, and more especially for the cultivation of the cochineal insect. In various places along the shores of the Mediterranean, and in South Africa, and even in Australia, the Opuntias have become naturalised, and appear like aboriginal inhabitants. It is, however, only in warm sunny regions that the naturalisation ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... were more like an awful, gigantic kind of insect—immense, golden-winged beetles or dragonflies or things of that sort—at once ugly and beautiful—than like anything else; only that they were a thousand and a million times as big. And with all this there ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... their beauty. A few years since, a severe frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing. In October last, a gale drove ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... dark when we arrived, and we were driven to our destination in a volante, we did not see much of the city. We could but observe that the streets were narrow, the houses irregular, most people black, and the volante, an amusing-looking vehicle, looking behind like a black insect with high shoulders, and with a little black postilion on a horse or mule, with an enormous pair of boots ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... katong'ging; the first of which I apprehend to be the anggrek bunga putri (Angraecum scriptum, R.) and the other the anggrek kasturi (Angraecum moschatum, R.) or scorpion-flower, from its resembling that insect, as the former does the butterfly. The musky scent resides at the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... and happiness will come, said the doctor, 'days when you will think no more of Miss Pew than of an insect which once ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... bullet-riddled—stood A presence ghostly, grim and stark, With trees all withered, wasted, gray, The place of combat night and day Like marshaled skeletons to mark. Anon, a lull: the troops are spelled. No sound of guns or drums Disturbs the air. Only the insect-chorus faintly hums, Chirping around the patient, sleepless dead Scattered, or fallen in heaps all wildly spread; Forgotten fragments left in hurried flight; Forms that, a few hours since, were human creatures, Now blasted of their features, Or stamped with ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... that has provided for them. Quite justifiably, society might annul the testamentary endowment of a hospital for fleas and lice, such as Bishop Heber, in his Indian tour, found existing at Baroach and at Surat, because those particular insect pests could scarcely be retained within the walls of their infirmary. Perhaps, too, society might be justified in similarly preventing the endowment of a hospital for superannuated dogs and cats; whether it would or not depending mainly on the awkward question whether ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... parental care. The female cod spawns about 6,000,000 eggs at a time, of which at most one-third—perhaps much less—are afterwards fertilised. An infinitesimal proportion of these escapes being devoured by fish or fowl. An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about 250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to thousands of millions. As a rule there is a kind of equilibrium between the forces of destruction and of reproduction. If ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... not tell his friend that a question of so great magnitude to him had been decided by the last sting which he had received from an insect so contemptible as Mr. Bonteen, but he expressed the feeling as well as he knew how to express it. "Oh, I shall be with you. I know what you are going to say, and I know how good you are. But I could not stand it. Men are beginning already to say things ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... a rather unfortunate kill, Willy, by your bare hand on your bare arm. You must learn to be cognizant of our insect ...
— Master of None • Lloyd Neil Goble
... various channels; the gall insects turn it into channels to suit their ends when they sting the leaf of a tree or the stalk of a plant, and deposit an egg in the wound. "Build me a home and a nursery for my young," says the insect. "With all my heart," says the leaf, and forthwith forgets its function as a leaf, and proceeds to build up a structure, often of great delicacy and complexity, to house and cradle its enemy. The current of life flows on blindly and takes any ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... unnoticed all his worth, Denied in Heaven the soul he held in earth; While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole, exclusive Heaven. Oh, man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Debased by slavery or corrupt by power, Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust, Degraded mass ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... on the market is the wasp gun. In theory it is something like a letter clip; you pull the trigger and the upper and lower plates snap together with a suddenness which would surprise any insect in between. The trouble will be to get him in the right place before firing. But I can see that a lot of fun can be got out of a wasp drive. We shall stand on the edge of the marmalade while the beaters go through it, ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... In the great storm of 1906 it was partly blown down, and was poorly restored. It was the prey of rat and insect, dusty, neglected, but endearing. It had had a season of glory. It was built for the first modern administration office of the French Government, over sixty years before, and was painted white with blue trimmings. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the countess had fallen into a state of depression which made her indifferent to the count's provocations. No longer finding a soft substance in which he could plant his arrows, the man became as uneasy as a child when the poor insect it is tormenting ceases to move. He now needed a confidant, as ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the other. On six feet of this superior article I fixed three artificial flies,—a simple brown hackle, a gray body with scarlet wings, and one of my own invention, which I thought would be new to the most experienced fly-catcher. The trout-fly does not resemble any known species of insect. It is a "conventionalized" creation, as we say of ornamentation. The theory is that, fly-fishing being a high art, the fly must not be a tame imitation of nature, but an artistic suggestion of it. It requires ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... think I, even I (an insect compared with this creature), have set my life on casts not a millionth part of this man's. But, after all, a crown may be not worth dying for. Yet, to outlive Lodi for this!!! Oh that Juvenal or Johnson could rise from the dead! 'Expende—quot libras ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... God shall give permission. The Sun of Righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approached, and now He fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which I seem to float, like an insect in the beams of the sun; exulting, yet almost trembling, while I gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, with unutterable wonder, why God should deign thus to shine upon a sinful worm"-(Cheever). [307] In the immediate view of heavenly felicity, Paul "desired to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... about roots: I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River. Look at my elm! Sprung from as good a seed as his, Sown at the same time, It is dying at the top: Not from lack of life, nor fungus, Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks. Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock, And can no further spread. And all the while the top of the tree Is tiring itself out, and ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... duty is violating one of nature's great laws. Even the lower forms of life afford example of this supreme law. Solomon startles the sluggard with his sharp admonition to betake himself to the ant. And Sir John Lubbock points men to the insect world to learn real diligence ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... fell into convulsions whenever he saw a spider. A waxen one was made, which equally terrified him. When he recovered, his error was pointed out to him, and the wax figure was placed in his hand without causing dread, and henceforth the living insect no longer disturbed him. Amatus Lusitanus relates the case of a monk who fainted when he beheld a rose, and never quitted his cell when that flower was in bloom. Scaliger, the great scholar, who had been a soldier a considerable portion ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... forms, the most familiar sounds become loud and alarming. Annie slept for about an hour soundly; then she awoke, trembling with cold in every limb, startled, and almost terrified by the oppressive loneliness of the night, sure that the insect life which surrounded her, and which would keep up successions of chirps, and croaks, and buzzes, was something mysterious and terrifying. Annie was a brave child, but even brave little girls may be allowed to possess nerves under her present conditions, and when a spider ran across her face ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... compressible, and the deeper down it is thrust the more will the air be compressed. At a depth of thirty-three feet the air will be compressed to half its bulk—in other words, the glass will be half-full of water. It is clear that a fly or any small insect could live in the air thus confined although thrust to great depths under water. But it could not live long, because air becomes unfit for use after being breathed a certain time, and cannot sustain life. Hence, if we are to preserve ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... Glave writes in the Century Magazine (LIII, 913): "Formerly [in the Congo Free State] an ordinary white man was merely called 'bwana' or 'Mzunga'; now the merest insect of a pale face earns the title of ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... black with the darkness of night in their melancholy depths. The earth white; snow to the thickness of many feet on all. Life none; not a beast of the earth, nor a fowl of the air, nor the hum of an insect. Solitude. Cold—grey, pitiless cold. Night ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... are both contained in one single expression in the text. "Even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect." The relationship between father and son implies consanguinity, likeness, similarity of character and nature. God made the insect, the stone, the lily; but God is not the Father of the caterpillar, the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh, God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... clean pasture or common. There is in this case a risk of wireworm and black bot; but if the turf is provided in good time and is laid up in the yard ready for use, it will be searched by the small birds and pretty well cleansed of the insect larvas that may have lurked in it when first removed. Lay the turves out in a frame, grass side downwards, and give them a soaking with water in which a very small quantity of salt has been dissolved. ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... wonderful machine had been here revealed to his gaze—manipulated without a word, marshaled by signs, and composed entirely of strangers! And to think that all this insect-like marvel of industry, so expeditious, and done on so huge a scale, had been going on daily under his own roof, and he had known nothing of it! So this was how his palace was cleaned for him, and why it never showed a sign of wear or the marks ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... however, we came sooner than we expected to some supplies of rain-water in a chain of pools. It is impossible to convey an idea of the dreary scene on which we entered after leaving this spot: the only vegetation was a low scrub in deep sand; not a bird or insect enlivened the landscape. It was, without exception, the most uninviting prospect I ever beheld; and, to make matters worse, our guide Shobo wandered on the second day. We coaxed him on at night, but he went to all points of the compass on the trails of elephants ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... this great man, he felt that he was no bigger than an insect. He seated himself on the shore and watched ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... to "the republic" in his humble person. The phylloxera has destroyed the vineyards of this or that region, but "the republican minister of agriculture" is successfully extirpating the injurious insect. The new schoolhouses of another city owe their magnificence "to the deep solicitude of the republic for the education of the masses," while the recently constructed bridge over the river is the work of "the engineers of the republic." In a word, the farmer and his crops, the mechanic ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Bacilikil (Insect Powder). Veribest (Boot Blacking). Uwantit (Combined pocket twoblade penknife with ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... nearly allied to the living Banded Ant-eater (Myrmecobius) of Australia (fig. 158). Amphilestes and Phascolotherium (fig. 184) are also believed by the same distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist to have been insect-eating Marsupials, and the latter is supposed to find its nearest living ally in the Opossums (Didelphys) of America. Lastly, the Stereognathus of the Stonesfield Slate is in a dubious position. It may have been a Marsupial; but, upon the whole, Professor Owen is inclined ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... matter on which he works, and not the manner of his work. But it is certain that a superior Being honors the stamp of perfection even in the most limited sphere, whilst He casts an eye of pity on the vain attempts of the insect which seeks to overlook the universe. It follows from this that I am especially unwilling to agree to the proposition in your papers, which assumes that the high destiny of man is to detect the spirit of the Divine Artist in the work of creation. To express the activity of infinite perfection, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... insect, obeying the blind instinct of its nature, adds particle to particle, and builds a house for itself at the same time that it helps to construct a continent; so we, obeying the voice of God, in every little duty, performed not grudgingly, but with the heart, are adding something to our eternal ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... "one soul expressed completely in a single person, I mean, is exceedingly rare. Not often is a physical instrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression. In the lower ranges of humanity—certainly in animal and insect life—one soul is shared by many. Behind a tribe of savages stands one Savage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through the consciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey the deep intelligence called instinct—all as one. The life of any one lion is the life of ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... painted yesterday. At the end of the room was a great chair, gilded and painted, too, three centuries before, and covered with velvet, gold-fringed, and powdered with golden grasshoppers. "That common insect here!" thought Rosa, in surprise, for she did not know that the chief of the house, long, long, long ago, when sleeping in the heat of noon in Palestine in the first crusade, had been awakened by a grasshopper lighting on his eyelids, and so had been aroused in time ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... who fed on the fragrance of fruits and flowers. Among the lower animals, he enumerates horned horses furnished with wings; the mantichora, with the face of a man, three rows of teeth, a lion's body, and a scorpion's tail; the basilisk, whose very glance is fatal; and an insect which cannot live except in the midst of the flames. But notwithstanding his credulity and his want of judgment, this elaborate work contains many valuable truths and much entertaining information. The prevailing character of his philosophical belief, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... kinds of termites was cupim, but technically they are known in the Order of Neoroptera as Termes album. Another variety of insect, the Psocus domesticus, was also as destructive as the ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... vegetation of former years, and were languidly filtered out into a brook, more healthy than the vast reservoir itself. Its banks were bordered with a deep, broad layer of mud, a transition substance between the rich vegetable matter which it once had been, and the multitudinous world of insect life which it was becoming. A cloud or mist at this time was hanging over it, high in air. A harsh and shrill sound, a whizzing or a chirping, proceeded from that cloud to the ear of the attentive listener. What these indications portended was plain. "There," said Juba, "is what will tell ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... 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 infuses something when it bites." "And do you not think, foolish man," rejoined Socrates, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... eating her life-blood away. To her, alone, in all that party, the warm arms of the sun brandished javelins, and the calm riches of the landscape concealed jibes. The meanest field labourer seemed happier than she, the commonest insect ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... by some geologists, that the coral insect, instead of raising its superstructure directly from the bottom of the sea, works only on the summits of submarine mountains, which have been projected upwards by volcanic action. They account, therefore, for the basin-like form so generally observed in coral islands, by supposing that they exist ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... the web, as if fascinated. The rightful possessor was also quiescent; but a very fine ear might have caught a low, humming sound, which probably augured no hospitable intentions to the invader. Anon, the stranger insect seemed suddenly to awake from its amaze; it evinced alarm, and turned to fly; the huge spider darted forward; the boy uttered a chuckle of delight. The man's pale lip curled into a sinister sneer, and he glided back to his seat. There, leaning his face on ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had built up slowly, surely, ultimately, this all-absorbing passion; that upon her was the hand of the Infinite driving her of her own nature to form a link in the great Life-chain that stretches from the Whence into the Whither, to lose herself in the appointed lot as the coral insect does whose tiny ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... to one of the servants. Not yet! When Mrs. Gallilee is angry, she doesn't get over it so soon as you seem to think. Leave her to dabble in science first," said the governess in tones of immeasurable contempt. "When she has half stifled herself with some filthy smell, or dissected some wretched insect or flower, she may be in a ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... to kill the supposed insect that troubled him, and giving vent to three or four violent sneezes, the interpreter awoke, and, growling something in Arabic, opened his eyes, which act enabled him to observe that his neighbour was awake and ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... her thread, and letting the end twist madly up amongst the revolving iron teeth, emerging from the mist of their own speed, in which a moment before they had looked ethereal as the vibration-film of an insect's wings. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... have done the most in this world for God and for men? The largely endowed men? 'Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called.' The coral insect is microscopic, but it will build up from the profoundest depth of the ocean a reef against which the whole Pacific may dash in vain. It is the small gifts that, after all, are the important ones. So let us cultivate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... suggestures. The girl stands in a pensive posture, her hands demurely clasped in front, her head poised a little on one side. Suddenly a wasp is heard to approach, and by her gestures is seen to have stung her on the breast. She then darts hither and thither in pursuit of that audacious insect, assuming all manner of provoking attitudes, until, finally, the wasp having been caught and miserably exterminated, the girl resumes her innocent smile ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... been displayed in the workmanship, I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that it was the most uncomfortable carpet I had ever seen. I wagged my finger at the repeated portrayals of the— to me!—unspeakable insect. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... with inestimably good things; that is, the act of dying, and not merely the being dead. It is no doubt as necessary to the nature of the soul, to its psychology, its soul-life, as the changes of the worm, chrysalis, and butterfly, are to the insect. And thus, as in all other things, where sin abounded, grace much more abounds, and even death, like a cross, is turned into ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... Rajah brought up the rear, and in this formation we marched along, alert for danger. At times the rustle of a bush in the breeze put us on our guard, and we crouched down with muscles tense and pistols raised; or the flutter of a bird over our heads, or the shrilling of an insect, or the creak of a tree sounded an alarm which would delay us. But Rajah's sense of hearing was very keen, and whenever we stopped from such sounds he would grin at us and push on ahead. We trusted a great deal to his woodcraft, for he was at ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... form, he had a feeling of commiseration rather than of relief. Worthless clay that the man was, it seemed petty now to have been so disturbed over his living on, for such satisfactions as his poor fragment of life gave him. Like the insignificant insect which preyed on its own petty world, he had, maybe, his rights to his prey. At all events, now that he had ceased to trouble, it was foolish to have any feeling of disgust, of reproach, of hatred. God and life had made him so, as God and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... obliging as to give us specimens. We never saw or heard of a firefly in Sicily. Professor Costa of Naples, though he doubted the fact of there being none, had never seen any in his frequent entomological trips to that island. This beautiful insect, so common about Florence and Rome, and in central Italy, is extremely rare about Naples; nor does this seem to be from their disliking the sea, for we never saw so many as at Pesaro, on the Adriatic;—no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... insects filling nostrils, ears, and eyes. Where they came from I cannot tell; the prairie seemed too small to hold them; the air too limited to yield them space. I had seen many vast accumulations of insect life in lands old and new, but never any thing that approached to this mountain of mosquitoes on the prairies of Dakota. To say that they covered the coat of the horse I rode would be to give but a faint idea ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... know when another tore through the apples on the pommel. And he winced and ducked even lower when a third bullet, fired low, struck a stone between his horse's legs and ricochetted off through the air, buzzing and humming like some incredible insect. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... only two things about you that's any good—your silence and your seamanship. Otherwise, you're a disreppitable, drunken insect." ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... monks and their legends, young man!" said Bardo, interrupting Tito impetuously. "It is enough to overlay human hope and enterprise with an eternal frost to think that the ground which was trodden by philosophers and poets is crawled over by those insect-swarms of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... has been in the ground two years. It is worn away; it is clay to clay. Where the heart moulders, a greenish dust, the stake is thrust. Late August it is, and night; a night flauntingly jewelled with stars, a night of shooting stars and loud insect noises. Down the road to Tilbury, silence—and the slow flapping of large leaves. Down the road to Sutton, silence—and the darkness of heavy-foliaged trees. Down the road to Wayfleet, silence—and the whirring scrape of insects in the branches. Down the road to Edgarstown, silence—and stars ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... there till the ravens pick your bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna or Brazil—may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles and ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... same in kind with those of man, though so different in degree, are capable of advancement. Thus the interval between the mental powers of one of the higher apes and of a fish, or between those of an ant and scale-insect, is immense; yet their development does not offer any special difficulty, for with our domesticated animals the mental faculties are certainly variable, and the variations are inherited. No one doubts that their mental faculties are of the utmost ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... take out twenty-four thousand dollars in a day. You can make more money with us than by taking flyers in wild-cat oil schemes, etc." The poster was illustrated by a huge machine gotten up on the centipede plan; at least, it resembled that hated insect from having attached to its frame two sets of wheels of different sizes along the sides like the legs of a centipede, but with a steam boiler for a head, and a big pipe for a throat from which the salt water was disgorged to ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... is surely not limited to that hoped-for future time when we shall have laid aside mortality, but the pure in heart see much of God here and now—see Him in the beauty of hill and dale, in cloud and blue sky, in placid pool and running water, in flowers and insect, and in the wonderful workings of the human heart! And so Dorian Trent and Carlia Duke, being of the pure in heart, saw much of God ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... occasions that occur rarely in a lifetime, we neglect the lesser ones. We imagine that our patience is capable of putting up with great sufferings and affronts, and we give way to impatience under the sting or bite of an insect. We fancy that we could help, wait upon, and relieve our neighbour in long or severe sickness, and yet we cannot bear that same neighbour's ill-bred manner, and irritating moods, his awkwardness and incivility, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... Capitaine." She held out an envelope to Joan, and busied herself about the room. "Ah! but he is gentil—M'sieur le Capitaine; young and of a great air." Celeste, it may be stated, viewed Baxter rather like a noisome insect. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... seemed to think he had some power of kicking left, for it returned to the charge in consequence of his review of Lockhart's "Life of Scott." In this article he was called a "spiteful miscreant," an "insect," a "grub," a "reptile." The "Quarterly Review" was as virulent and violent as the magazines, but the attack was more skillful as well as longer and more elaborate. By garbling extracts it cleverly insinuated a good deal more than it said, and it ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... and burning eye, the Strangler continued his maneuvers with so much patience, that Djalma, still sleeping, but no longer able to bear this vague, annoying sensation, raised his right hand mechanically to his face, as if he would have brushed away an importunate insect. But he had not strength to do it; almost immediately after, his hand, inert and heavy, fell back upon his chest. The Strangler saw, by this symptom, that he was attaining his object, and continued to stroke, with the same address, the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... I am going away," she said, and stared at the horizon. For a space she listened to the chirping of a cheerful insect and the small, regular noise of Halkett's breathing, but as he made no other sound she turned sharply ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... which govern the return of the dead." His laugh died, he became very earnest and very sincere. "Now, men of science, all we ask of you is to apply your precision of handling to subjects a little more worth while than the putrid body of an insect." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... coursers that must mount the steep of noon: and he heard the morning hymn of thankfulness to Heaven from the mountains, and the valleys, and the islands of the sea; the prayer of man and woman, the praise of lisping tongues, the hum of insect joy upon the air, the sheep-bell tinkling in the distance, the wild bird's carol, and the lowing kine, the mute minstrelsy of rising dews, and that stilly scarce-heard universal melody of wakeful plants and trees, hastening to turn their spring-buds to the light—this was the anthem ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... world was in the mystery of knowledge,—and he took all nature as his province. He gave his life and his soul for the mastery of science; he observed, he studied, he pondered everything. From the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground, nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing too small to escape him. Weighing, measuring, experimenting, {675} he dug deep for the inner reality of things; he spent years drawing ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Messrs. Schneider, Schnitzel, Schnorrer & Schmidt and the commissions of their representative. Also he felt that he was assisting at the making of history. 'Orace in a bloomin' siege—Gorblimey!—and he, who had never killed anything bigger than an insect in his life, lusted to know how it felt to shove your bayonet into a feller or shoot 'im dead at short rynge. So Horace drilled with alacrity and zest, paid close attention to aiming-instruction and to such visual-training and distance-judging ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... day that was sprawling upon its back. It was kicking hard in its efforts to turn over. Lincoln stooped and set it right. "Do you know," he said to the friend beside him, "I shouldn't have felt just right if I'd left that insect struggling there. I wanted to put him on his feet and give him a chance with all the ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... see why I shouldn't have a specimen too," he said to himself, as, regardless of the heat, he took off his straw hat, and crept silently on with his eyes fixed upon the spot where the beautiful insect had disappeared. He was within a yard of it, with upraised hat ready to strike, when it darted up, and he made a bound forward, striking downward with his hat at ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... vanishing point; thinness &c 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy^, Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon^, urchin, elf; atomy^, dandiprat^; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my-thumb^; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling^, cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet^, fly, midge, gnat, shrimp, minnow, worm, maggot, entozoon^; bacteria; infusoria^; microzoa [Micro.]; phytozoaria^; microbe; grub; tit, tomtit, runt, mouse, small fry; millet seed, mustard seed; barleycorn; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Nimaera, Who their every purpose ruleth, Tends it in its first conception, Baffles wholly and destroys it, Or unto completion brings it, Bringeth out its faults or virtues, Shewing where its merit lieth. Then shall every beast that liveth, Every bird and every reptile, Every fish and every insect, Raise their own peculiar voices— (Terrible, or sweet, or puny); And will testify their own way Of the powers of King Nimaera, Who their being's fire feedeth, Gives them space for life and glory, With that limit ends their being; For ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... be a great many of them," answered Arthur, "and it is supposed that new ones are constantly being formed by the labours of the coral insect. A bare ledge of coral first appears, just at the surface; it arrests floating substances, weeds, trees, etcetera; soon the sea-birds begin to resort there; by the decay of vegetable and animal matter a thin soil ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... jar and daubed her glowing cheek with the cleansing cream. Everybody laughed. "And now while we leave this cream on for a minute or two I will endeavor to interest you in my various powders." She gave an animated recommendation of powders from talcum to insect. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... beautiful. He affirmed it with the conviction of one arisen from the grave who returns unexpectedly to the world. Man could move freely, the same as the bird and the insect, on the bosom of Nature. There was a place for all. Why confine oneself by the bonds which others had invented, tyrannizing over the future of the men who were to come after them? The dead, ever the accursed ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the wood's insect-hum Invites ye; expand there, like buds in the sun; Leave schools and their studies for days that will come, And let thy first lessons from nature be won! Teachings hath nature most sage and most sweet— The music that swells in the tree-linnet's ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... more quickly. Three steps and he had brought his foot down hard. Jerry did not enjoy killing even a spider but this time it seemed necessary, though he carefully refrained from looking at the dead insect. ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... castle has ever gone to work more deliberately or fiendishly to entrap his victims while offering them hospitality, than does this plant-ogre. Attracted by the bizarre yellowish hoods of the tall, nodding flowers, the foolish insect alights upon the former and commences his exploration ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of color which seizes the uninitiated at the door of a picture-gallery? So many staring hues impinge upon the eyes, so many ideas take confused shape and struggle together in the brain, that the eyes grow weary and the brain harassed. It hovers undecided like an insect in a meadow full of flowers. The buzzing remarks of the crowd add to the feeling of intoxication. They distract one's attention before it can settle anywhere, and carry it off to where some group ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... it is toil without [Greek: merimna], without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring instinct to an unfailing end. The insect and the bird provide for the morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them remain with God. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of good government or the birth of men who are to prove virtuous rulers. It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and a single, soft horn. As messenger of mercy and benevolence, the Kirin never treads on a live insect or eats growing grass. Later philosophy made this imaginary beast the incarnation of those five primordial elements—earth, air, water, fire and ether of which all things, including man's body, are made and which are symbolized in the shapes of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... wound—weary and hopeless is the king. Through the Wound-motive comes the sweet woodland music and the breath of the blessed morning, fragrant with flowers and fresh with dew. It is one of those incomparable bursts of woodland notes, full of bird-song and the happy hum of insect life and rustling of netted branches and waving of long tasseled grass. I know of nothing like it save the ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... Asano, in expounding the political history of the intervening two centuries, drew an apt image from a seed eaten by insect parasites. First there is the original seed, ripening vigorously enough. And then comes some insect and lays an egg under the skin, and behold! in a little while the seed is a hollow shape with an active grub ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... and lifted his terrible right arm to brush her from him, as he might have brushed an insect from him. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... the day, and kept her informed of the thousand and one small events which fill life in Paris with variety. Her melancholy, deep and real though it was was still the melancholy of a woman rich in many ways. The Marquise d'Aiglemont was like a flower, with a dark insect gnawing at its root. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... thought and been taught that it was a bird," he said, "but you see so clearly and report so accurately, you almost convince me it is some large insect ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... stood still, looking this way and that in a perfect delirium of fear. Finally he whirled around to the right, shrieking wildly (I think some nocturnal insect had brushed against him), plunged babbling up the bank to the hedge and heedless of the fact that it contained many thorns which must have cruelly lacerated his bare body, scrambled half through it and half over it into ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... played on the sands as though the broken water were full of living gems. The sky was full of strange gulls with long, forked tails, and a lovely little flying lizard with transparent wings of the palest green—like those of a grasshopper—was flitting about picking up insect stragglers. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... draws up the carbon of the oil to be made into carbonic acid at the flame. All matters in process of combustion, decay, fermentation, or putrefaction, are returning to the atmosphere those constituents, which they obtained from it. Every living animal, even to the smallest insect, by respiration, spends its life in the production of this material necessary to the growth of plants, and at death gives up its body in part for such ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... disappeared shortly afterwards, when a number of large beetles, called elaters, took their place, displaying both red and green lights. The red glare, like that of a lamp, alternately flashed and vanished, as the insect turned its body in flight; and now and then a green light was displayed. The mingling of the two colours, red and green, in the evolutions of flight totally surpasses my power of description. We caught several, and had we possessed ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... was not in Assuncion, but some twenty miles out in the "campo." He rarely visited the capital, except on matters of business. For a business he had; this of somewhat unusual character. It consisted chiefly in the produce of his gun and insect-net. Many a rare specimen of bird and quadruped, butterfly and beetle, captured and preserved by Ludwig Halberger, at this day adorns the public museums of Prussia and other European countries. But for the dispatch and shipment of ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... were raw, but never had eggs, boiled, fried, or poached, tasted so nice before! He had just finished his meal, and was wishing that a third egg had remained in the ruined nest, when a slight sound like the buzzing of an insect made him look round, and there, within a few feet of him, was the big black weasel once more, looking strangely bold and savage-tempered. It kept staring fixedly at Martin out of its small, wicked, beady black eyes, and snarling so as to show its white sharp teeth; and very white they ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... was doing, then she became absorbed in her work. Then she reached for her color box and brushes, and shortly afterward tacked against the wall an extremely clever drawing of a greatly enlarged wasp. Skillfully she had sketched a face that was recognizable round the big insect eyes. She had surmounted the face by a fluff of bejewelled yellow curls, encased the hind legs upon which the creature stood upright in pink velvet Turkish trousers and put tiny gold shoes on the feet. She greatly exaggerated the wings into long trails and made them of green ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter |
