"Starfish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was something like a devilfish, or possibly an overgrown starfish, but it's too flat, and has no body that I can see," Costigan made answer. "It must be a kind of flat worm. That doesn't sound reasonable—the thing must be all of a hundred meters long—but there it is. The only thing left to do now, as I see it, is to ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... Vandersee produced a folded map and smoothed it out on the table. It was a map of Celebes, and across the face of it ran red lines. Celebes is shaped like no other island on earth. It is like a nightmarish starfish shaved clean of legs on one side. It is nothing but a series of peninsulas, and along each peninsula runs a mountain range, from which rivers small or fairly big run either way into the sea. It was across the peninsula partially drained by the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... did not expect him to fall into mischief, and thought that very likely Mr Starfish's eloquence might be the operating attraction, granted him the exeat without any difficulty, and on Saturday Hazlet was reclining in a first-class carriage, with Bruce, Brogten, and Fitzurse, on his way ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the rank marsh grass, And laid its chilling, fingers on our pulse. Sea nettles lay in many a shapeless mass, Half hidden, in the garnet hills of dulse. The awkward crabs ran sideways from our path, And starfish sprawled face downward in the mud; While, token of some bleak December's wrath, A wreck lay stranded ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... was changed into a great rough red starfish, who goes about killing the poor mussels, while nobody loves him, or cares to take his part; and the poor little girl was changed into a beautiful bright jelly-fish, like that one, who swims about all day in the pleasant sunshine, with a red ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the most familiar representative of the Echinoderms, seems very far removed from the kind of worm-like ancestor we have been imagining, but, fortunately, the very interesting story of the starfish is easily learned from the geological chronicle. Reflect on the flower-like expansion of its arms, and then imagine it mounted on a stalk, mouth side upward, with those arms—more tapering than they now are—waving round ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... dotted over the stems like buds. Others form solid masses; others, again, rounded skull like boulders, or elevations like toadstools. The colours of the skeletons and the animals are vivid scarlets and purples and greens. Sea anemones, shell-fish, and starfish of the most vivid hues are as abundant as the corals. Brilliant fish dart through the blossoms of the marine gardens, and sea birds scream and wheel in the air. The whole region is a paradise for the naturalist. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... fathered embryo and starfish and sea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him the mother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at the very foundations of the organic world, and defies all attempts of chemical synthesis to ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... issues: deforestation results as more and more land is being cleared for agriculture and settlement; some damage to coral reefs from starfish and indiscriminate coral and shell collectors; overhunting threatens native ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... temperature has gone down to 18 deg. below zero (-27 deg. C.). I took up the dredge I had put out yesterday. It brought up two pails of mud from the bottom, and I have been busy all day washing this out in the saloon in a large bath, to get the many animals contained in it. They were chiefly starfish, waving starfish, medusae (Astrophyton), sea-slugs, coral insects (Alcyonaria), worms, sponges, shell-fish, and crustaceans; and were, of course, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... the peculiar display of animal and vegetable growth was plain to see once more. Great sea slugs crawled about on the bottom with gigantic starfish, and actiniae of vivid colours spread ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... rose. The fact that the lake fishes are fresh-water, rather than marine, forms does not bother him. Senor Posnansky pins his faith to a small dried seahorse once given him by a Titicaca fisherman. He seems to forget that dried specimens of marine life, including starfish, are frequently offered for sale in the Andes by the dealers in primitive medicines who may be found in almost every market-place. Probably Senor Posnansky's seahorse was brought from the ocean by some particularly enterprising ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... the rocks descend to the sea level, we roam the beach and gather sea shells, starfish, and sea urchins; and by a shallow pool we stop to watch the scarlet fringes of the sea anemones, waving back and forth with the action of the tide. Barnacles cover the top of every rock that the tide reaches, and the long, blackish, ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... follow the minor incidents round the beach; first, under the lighthouse, a stick, with its echo below a little to the right; above, a black stone, and its echo to the right; under the white figure, another stick, with its echo to the left; then a starfish,[X] and a white spot its echo to the left; then a dog, and a basket to double its light; above, a fisherman, and his wife for an echo; above them, two lines of curved shingle; above them, two small black figures; above them, two unfinished ships, and two forked masts; above ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recline in Fleet Street, or wherever stern business keeps one, and to think of the sea. I do not envy the millions at Margate and Blackpool, at Salcombe and Minehead, for I have persuaded myself that the sea is not what it was in my day. Then the pools were always full of starfish; crabs—really big crabs—stalked the deserted sands; and anemones waved their feelers at you from ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... with an almost feverish interest. She tore long gluey masses of seaweed from the rocks and insisted on carrying them home; the mussels she found on the rocks interested her; she questioned the little shrimp fishers for several minutes about a dead starfish, and they stared in open-eyed amazement, thinking it very strange that a grown-up woman should ask such questions. At last the little boy showed her what she was to do with the lobster. He wedged the claws with two bits of wood, and attached a string whereby she ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... hasn't gone bankrupt long ago," said the new governor, after the clerk had explained the meaning of various signs and wonders. "What does this starfish against ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... simple. It is that all human beings are superhuman beings. We have printed our own image upon Nature, as God has printed His image upon us. We have told the enormous sun to stand still; we have fixed him on our shields, caring no more for a star than for a starfish. And when there were powers of Nature we could not for the time control, we have conceived great beings in human shape controlling them. Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the march and victory of Jupiter. Neptune ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the water was deep—deeper than Donald could fathom at low tide—and it was cold, and covered a rocky bottom, upon which a multitude of starfish and prickly sea-eggs lay in clusters. It was green, smooth and clear, too; sight carried straight down to where the purple-shelled mussels ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... rule, fertilised. The eggs of a sea-urchin can be fertilised by sperm of their own species, or, though in smaller numbers, by the sperm of other species of sea-urchins, but not by the sperm of other groups of echinoderms, e.g. starfish, brittle-stars, holothurians or crinoids, and still less by the sperm of more distant groups of animals. The consensus of opinion seemed to be that the spermatozoon must enter the egg through a narrow opening or canal, the so-called micropyle, and that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others |
