"Octopus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accountable for many errors of the day. The incubus of this school is fastened upon the vocal profession with octopus-like tentacles which reach out in every direction, and which strive to strangle the truth in every possible way; but, while "life is short, art is long;" ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... 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 a ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... form of life there is a weed; a hideous monstrosity, shaped something like an octopus, and capable of the most horrible—" He stopped abruptly, remembering that one of his hearers was a woman. "Never mind about ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... motives. Tobacco was his excuse for visiting the floating den of temptation, but a craving for strong drink was his real motive. This craving had been created imperceptibly, and had been growing by degrees for some years past, twining its octopus arms tighter and tighter round his being, until the strong and hearty young fisherman was slowly but surely becoming an abject slave, though he had fancied himself heretofore as free as the breezes that whistled round his vessel. Now, for the first time, Lockley began to have uncomfortable ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... to tell him, with gay digressions, about the invention which enabled Westangle to buy up the other clothes-pins and merge them in his own—to become a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of other clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle pin. "But he isn't in clothespins now. He's in mines, and banks, and steamboats, and railroads, and I don't ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the cuttle-fish tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, the argonaut, the squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance upon this or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of invertebrate animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (teste Victor Hugo) in their ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... off suddenly at a tangent. The tentacles of this crime octopus, of which Danglar seemed to be the head, reached far and into most curious places to fasten and hold and feed on the progeny of human foibles! She could not help wondering where the lair was from which emanated ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... fought the debauching of a nation's manhood by the legalized sale of a deadly poison, alcohol. And it has fought without quarter the pernicious activity of morally stunted brewers and distillers, whose hellish motto is, 'Make the boys drink!' It has fought the money octopus, and again and again has sounded to the world the peril which money-drunken criminals like Ames and his clique constitute. And for that we must now wear the crown ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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 the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... elemental forces. 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 a ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... have 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 ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... "Octopus" is spelled "octupus" in this volume. This was changed in the table of contents and a chapter ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... in quite a lively adventure. He was about to dive over from the side of the sloop into the cool water for a bath, when he saw some dark object moving on the bottom and checked himself. It was well that he did so for the object proved to be an octopus, or devil fish, edging its way nearly under the sloop toward the shore. Its great tentacles stretched out nine or ten feet from its round body and a more repulsive or dangerous looking creature is hard to ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... wonderful thing is yet more "all over the shop" than its kindred. Its dorsal sepal measures three inches in length, its "tail," five inches, with an enormous lip between. They term it the Squid Flower, or Octopus, in Mexico; and a good name too. But in place of the rather weakly colouring habitual it has a grand decision of character, though the tones are like—pale yellow and greenish; its raised spots, red and deep green, are distinct as points ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... feather-abomination called a pillow, yielding to pressure, rises up on either side of your head and engulfs eyes and nose and everything else into its folds. No escape! You are strangled, smothered; you might as well have gone to bed with an octopus. In this horrid contrivance you lie for eight long hours, clapped down like a corpse in its coffin. Every single bed in rural England ought to be burnt. Not one of them is fit for a Christian ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... had a cabinet of stuffed and dried fishes, of shells, sea-weeds, corals, and madrepores, that was the admiration and envy of the Royal Society. He had penetrated into the watery den of the Sepia Octopus, disturbed the conjugal happiness of that turtle-dove of the ocean, and come off victorious in a sanguinary conflict. He had been becalmed in the tropical seas, and had watched, in eager expectation, though unhappily ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... island and 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 of its ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... 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 through such ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... proclaimed Ben, who had joined the group as the monster vanished, "some calls 'em octopus, but devil-fish is a better word, to ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... 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
... square miles, occupying a kind of oblong basin, extending from the foot of Ytaioa on the north to a low range of rocky hills on the south. From the wooded basin long narrow strips of forest ran out in various directions like the arms of an octopus, one pair embracing the slopes of Ytaioa, another much broader belt extending along a valley which cut through the ridge of hills on the south side at right angles and was lost to sight beyond; ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... the ground like a goaded bull when that game was being played, to the consternation of his opponents. He had a younger brother with inordinately long arms, like a great lax ape, a cheerful, grinning, harmless creature as I remember him. He was a football player too; his hug was that of an octopus which swallowed you all. As for the English, in return for their football lore they received the gift of tobacco. I learned to smoke at fifteen from a Chilian called Perez, a wizened, preternaturally wise, old youth. Nobody in the world could have been wise as he looked, and nobody else in the ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... 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
... 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
... 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 of these hideously ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... could, receiving toleration, and a quiet measure of approbation, possibly on the supposition, realized in the fruition of time, that such discussion might eventuate in the liberation of white men from the octopus of subserviency to the dictum of slavery which permeated every ramification of American society. I heard Hon. Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky, sometime in the forties, while making a speech in Philadelphia, say: "Gentlemen, the question is not alone whether ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... power 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 ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... 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 thus fixed, it required great force ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the 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 would have to be universal in its application. This experience ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... shivering boy as the British bathing-woman. There she stands, waist-deep in the swelling brine; she grins and chuckles like an ogress; her red, grasping hands stretch forth like the tentacles of an octopus; she seizes her victim in an irresistible embrace, and with horrid glee plunges him head-under the advancing wave. Ere he can fetch his breath to scream, down again he goes, and yet again. The frigid, heavy water stings his cowering body; he has swallowed quarts of it; his foot has come in ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... come 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 ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... 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 ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... fragment of a body which hung down in shreds and rags, having the appearance of twisted snakes. When they moved they dragged themselves along the ground by their arms. (From this description and from native carvings, I am inclined to believe that a large cuttle-fish or octopus must have suggested this idea to the original narrator of this tradition.) Little by little, the body was brought into more compact form, and, in a later generation, legs appeared, but it was a long time before they became ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... vainly begs me to clear the film which is slowly closing over her eyes. She labors in a true landscape garden—the small circle wrested with cutlass and fire from the great jungle, and kept free only by constant cutting of the vines and lianas which creep out almost in a night, like sinister octopus tentacles, to strangle the strange upstarts and rejungle ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... nor house In pibcorns when the youth of Wales carouse ... No tournure doth the toucan's tail contort ... So I am sad! ... and yet, on Summer eves, When xebecs search the whishing scree for whelk, And the sharp sorrel lifts obcordate leaves, And cryptogamous plants fulfil the elk, I see the octopus play with his feet, And find ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... a different fellow from Douglas Shafto of "Malahide." He seemed to have cast off a load of care; the cramped, monotonous life, his mother's hard indifference, the octopus-like Cossie, all had slipped from his shoulders and were figuratively buried in the heaving, dark blue sea. What delicious hours of tranquil ease were enjoyed in a steamer chair; hours when he looked on the past five years as ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... not so long ago comprised by the latter, and, by a well-directed combination of courage and craft, she has within the last twenty years succeeded in conquering or annexing extensive and fertile tracts of country in Central Asia. What more likely, therefore, than that, octopus-like, she should continue to stretch out her huge tentacles further and further, until they embrace some of the broad and fair provinces of China within their omnivorous grasp? The advantage of such an acquisition ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... 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 in the way of the theory of evolution by natural ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... system, the 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 ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... Somebody 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 ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... took 320 bushels to pay the same interest. Frequently the interest was higher 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
... an octopus, Dick," he muttered, turning the light now full upon the grisly object squatting on a rock at the farther end of the water cave and glaring balefully at the boys through his blood-red eyes, like some demon of the deep, the very ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... sea nymph, twist and turn like a thing alive; 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 entangled ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... Robin was racing over the mountain roads in a high-power car, attended by a merry company of conspirators whose sole object was to keep him out of the clutches of that far-reaching octopus, William W. Blithers. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... with a methodical 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 ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... approach to London, and of the dominion of great cities, those octopus monsters created by men, whose tentacles are strong to seize and stronger still to keep. She was infected by Androvsky's dread of a changed life, and through her excitement, that pulsed with interest and curiosity, she felt ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Girdlestones to be a very important one. The haze on the horizon to the north was rather thicker than elsewhere, and a few thin streaky clouds straggled upwards across the clear cold heaven, like the feelers of some giant octopus which lay behind the fog bank. At the same time the sea changed in places from the appearance of quicksilver to ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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; ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... expeditions, we occupied the "Buli's" hut and lived on the fat of the land. At meal times quite a procession of men and women, glistening all over with coconut oil, would enter our hut bearing all sorts of native food, including fish in great variety, yams, octopus, turtle, sucking-pig, chicken, prawns, etc. They were brought in on banana and other large leaves, and we, of course, ate them with our fingers. Good as the food undoubtedly was, I was always glad when the meal was over, as it is very far from comfortable to sit with your legs doubled ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... I was fighting an octopus. My competitors all were arrayed against me with a force I had never before experienced. They spared no effort to crush the man who had beaten them over and over again in battles for commercial supremacy. It was their turn now and they showed ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... 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 the law. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... And he would listen to no half-measures. Had not his grandfather quarrelled with Henry Clay, and so shaken the friendship of a lifetime, because of a great compromise which he could not countenance? And was his grandson to truckle and make deals with this hideous octopus that was sucking the life-blood from the city's veins? Had he not but yesterday distributed six hundred circulars, calling for honest government, to six hundred possible voters, all the way up ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... is given to capsizing on." The line in his senior's cheek flickered with a hinted smile. "None of the kind that run after him, lie in wait for him, buzz round him like wasps about a honey-bowl. I've developed muscle getting the boy out of amatory scrapes, with the Society octopus, with the Garrison husband-hunter, with the professional man-eater, theatrical or music-hall; and the latest, most inexpressible She, is always the loveliest woman ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Uther Pendragon; Roman under Caesar; Saxon under the Heptarchy; Danish under Harold; Norman after William; then became, thanks to the Lords, English. After that she became Anglican. To have one's religion at home is a great power. A foreign pope drags down the national life. A Mecca is an octopus, and devours it. In 1534, London bowed out Rome. The peerage adopted the reformed religion, and the Lords accepted Luther. Here we have the answer to the excommunication of 1215. It was agreeable to Henry VIII.; but, in other respects, the Lords were a trouble to him. As a bulldog ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... soft, languorous strains of a waltz, the murmur of voices, the laughter of some of the people in the conservatory. Stafford sat, his head still upon his hands, as if her were half stupefied. And indeed he was. He felt like a man who has been seized by the tentacles of an octopus, unable to struggle, unable to move, dumb-stricken, and incapable even of protest. Sir Stephen had spoken of fate: Fate held Stafford under its iron heel, and the mockery of Fate's laughter mingled with the strains of the waltz, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... as a terrible place, though a necessity: Daddy's office was there; Christmas and Birthday presents came from London, but also it was where the Radical govunment lived—an enormous, evil, octopus kind of thing that made Daddy poor. Weeden, too, had been known to say dark things with regard to selling vegetables, hay, and stuff. "What can yer igspect when a Radical govunment's in?" And the fact that neither he nor Daddy did ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... this octopus of the air clutched them in its corpse-like grip, breathing its wet vapoury breath into their faces, soddening their clothes with heavy moisture and slackening their energies as it had already damped their hopes of ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... hemisphere. Surrounding the central figure in the pool are the four Oceans,—the Atlantic with corraled tresses and sea horses in her hand, riding a helmeted fish; the Northern Ocean as a Triton mounted on a rearing walrus; the Southern Ocean as a negro backing a sea elephant and playing with an octopus; and the Pacific as a female on a creature that might be a sea lion, but is not. Dolphins backed by nymphs of the sea serve a double purpose as decoration and as spouts ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... 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 ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... hand. Then tentacle after tentacle, myriad-suckered and wildly waving, emerged. Laying hold of his arm, they writhed and coiled about his flesh like so many snakes. With a heave and a jerk appeared the entire squid, a proper devil-fish or octopus. ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... him; his body brushed sharply against the branches, and then looming before him was an old monarch of the forest that somehow had escaped when the slide had scarred the mountain-side. Its gnarled branches, standing out vaguely in the half-light of the moon and stars like the arms of an octopus, seemed to Teeny-bits to rise up and seize him. He had the feeling that something was lifting him into the air, that he was going up and up into the silver face of the moon. It seemed also that at the same time there was a flash of light ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... a dishpan! Of a pail! A tub! Of an inverted wastebasket wherein The head finds lodgment most appropriate! Shape of a wide-spread wilted griddlecake! Shape of the body of an octopus Set sideways on a fireman's ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... may be counted as an evidence of China's traditional luck which brought him to the helm. General Li Yuan Hung knew well that the cool and singular plan which had been pursued to forge a national mandate for a revival of the empire would take years completely to obliterate, and that the octopus-hold of the Military Party—the army being the one effective organization which had survived the Revolution—could not be loosened in a day,—in fact would have to be tolerated until the nation asserted itself and showed that it could and would be master. In the circumstances his authority ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... most serious air in the world, "I remember perfectly to have seen a large vessel drawn under the waves by an octopus's arm." ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... They do not answer him, they do not argue; in dead silence, and with one accord they fall upon him. All you can see from the bed is a confused tangle of waving arms and legs, suggestive of an intoxicated octopus trying to find bottom. Not a word is spoken; that seems to be the etiquette of the thing. If you are sleeping in your pyjamas, you spring from the bed, and only add to the confusion; if you are wearing a less showy garment, you stop where you are and shout ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 pitahaya, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... with both cuttle-fish and squid is their cousin the octopus—a creepy, crawly creature, like eight serpents in one—at once the oddest and the most fascinating creature in the entire aquarium. You will find a crowd almost always before his grotto watching his curious antics. Usually ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... few hundred miles are all that are granted to me. And London is like a terrible octopus. Its arms stretch ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... threshold of the secret cell. But what was that 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
... Fish are 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 ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... does not 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
... 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 said ...
— Options • O. Henry
... now 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, as a part of ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... 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. As they were nearing ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... at one time or another and left loopholes through which the police were able to attack them and break them up. But Rudolph Rayne had flung his octopus-like tentacles so far afield that he had actually attached to him—by fear of blackmail—an eminent Counsel who appeared for the defense of any member of the circle who happened to make a slip. That well-known member of the Bar I will call Mr. Henry Moyser, ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... 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 her, even ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... southward 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 to ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... tentacles awoke to dreadful life, writhing in aimless excitement, although there was 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 ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... 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, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... was as an axe laid at the root of the tree. There was here no question, as with trade, of the mere loss of hands who could be replaced. Attacking the family in the person of its natural supporter and protector, the octopus system of which the gangs were the tentacles struck at the very foundations of domestic life and brought to thousands of households a poverty as bitter and a grief ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... degrees of success. Perhaps the nearest approach to the Rhodesian line-up was the struggle of the California wheat growers against the Southern Pacific Railway, which Frank Norris dramatized in his book, "The Octopus." ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... 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 ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... I would think of my native land as a beautiful mermaid, about whom the giant's cold, chilly arms were slowly creeping, and I feared that some day those arms would crush her. That day has come. The helpless mermaid lies prostrate in the clutch of the octopus. Not that the constitution of Finland has been annulled, as has been so often erroneously stated, and quite generally believed. The Russian Government has made only a few inroads upon it. The great grievance of the Finns is not with what has been absolutely done in opposition to their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... a giant squid, or octopus. Except that it was bigger than any ever seen before, and invisible to the eye, of course. Did you ever read Hugo's terrible story of Gilliat's fight ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... Octopus must watch his ways and guard his awful arms, And keep his eyes peeled mighty close around the Kansas farms; The days of peace are over there! too long the robber-trust Has rifled all their pocket-books and left them but a crust; But Kansas has a sudden ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... 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." ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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
... I have loved the Octopus, Since we were boys together. I love the Vulture and the Shark: ...
— Greybeards at Play • G. K. Chesterton
... fall of the ocean swell. Only in one part could we see the white sand at the bottom of the pool, for the depth of water was some six or seven fathoms. Both blue and brown groper are very fond of crabs; in fact, when a big, wary fellow will not look at either a piece of octopus or the flesh of the aliotis shell, he cannot resist a crab. We soon secured plenty of crabs of all sizes and colours, and, baiting our lines with two of the largest, dismembered the others, and flung portions of them into the pool. A ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... the sacrifice of your personality does not always lead to self-deception, to hypocrisy! It is an excuse for the busybody-rich to advertise their charities. If they were as many armed as Briareus or the octopus, their charity would be known to each and every hand on their arms. These sentimental anarchs! They even marry our girls and carry them off to coddle their conscience with gilded gingerbread. Yet they would turn ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... 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 of his long ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... 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 ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Englishmen are brimful of common sense, Dartrey, if you know where to dig for it. We'll materialise your own dream. We'll bring the principles of socialism into our human and daily life and those octopus trades unions shall ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 sacrifice. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... consolidations will only be tolerated when confidence is established that the masses will be benefited. When the scheme of the Consolidated Companies first became known, it was bitterly opposed by the public, who saw in it nothing other than a new and more gigantic octopus, to ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... 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 dugs, Twin-whelp to ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... 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
... 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
... of trick 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 chances for gorgeous ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... pedestal, expedite, expediency, expedition, quadruped, impediment, biped, tripod, chiropodist, octopus, pew; (2) centiped, pedicle, pedometer, velocipede, sesquipedalian, antipodes, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... animals, decorate them and lead them to pastures where, tethered to rings attached to a long rope, "they may graze together pleasantly." One of the islands we visited bore the name of the giant radish, Daikon, which is itself a corruption of the word for octopus. The island devoted itself mainly to the growing of peonies and ginseng. The ginseng is largely exported to China and Korea, but there is a certain consumption in Japan. Ginseng is sometimes chewed, but ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... India stands in a dangerous place. We knew it, and tried to persuade her to take refuge in Jesus. She listened, almost decided, then drew back; afterwards we found out why. You have seen the picture of a man sucked under sea by an octopus; it was like that. You have imagined the death-struggle; it was like that. But it all went on under the surface of the water, there was nothing seen above, till perhaps a bubble rose slowly and broke; it was like that. One day, in the broad noontide, a woman suddenly fell in the street. Someone ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... and annex the richest portion of Mexico. Why should not Mexico therefore reclaim her own? Why not turn the tables and annex a part of the vast territory stolen from her by the octopus arms ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... 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 ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... 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
... real art of living is perfected among us, the present ethical system will be wholly outmoded. Meanwhile, pressure brought to bear on the least welcome of all virtues is merely going to make bad behavior worse. But that is Volstead's business, not ours. Let him do battle with that octopus, while we bring up reinforcements to his enemies. Women know all about how to be bad and comfortable while the law goes on trying to make them good and otherwise. Just look at a few of the things on which ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the headache-fiend 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 ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... 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 ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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 ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... a bevy of armed Zulus, she promptly fell upon my neck with a cry for help, for the silly woman thought she was going to be killed by them. Gripping me as an octopus grips its prey, she proceeded to faint, dragging me to my knees beneath the weight of eleven stone of ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... that 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; ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... a heavy-built octopus sort of man of about forty-seven; a red cheery complexion, rather more fat than muscle, long grey hair tending to curl at the extremes, and followed about by a lady who acts as his secretary, calls him "Master" and adores the ground he walks on. They are married, but not, I should hasten to add, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... of 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 ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 |
