"Maggot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eggs as it flies in so dexterous a manner on the single hairs of the legs and flanks of grass-horses. But then Derham is mistaken when he advances that this oestrus is the parent of that wonderful star-tailed maggot which he mentions afterwards; for more modern entomologists have discovered that singular production to be derived from the egg of the musca chamaeleon: see ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... a sweet-tooth; and don't relish life: You want run-honey, when it's the honeycomb That gives the crunch and flavour. Would you be As happy as a maggot in a medlar, Swelling yourself in sweet deliciousness, Till the blackbird nips you? None escapes his crop. You'd quarrel with the juiciest plum, because Your teeth grit on the stone, instead of cracking The shell, and savouring the bitter kernel. Nigh all the jests ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... cried, "plump out with the truth, and without any flattery. Everybody, you know, has some odd maggot or other; and as for me, I pride myself no little on being utterly without all those things which in the world they christen handsome. Now let me see ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... ran a little rib, seemingly of earth and dead wood, almost straight, and about half an inch across, leading to a great brown lump among the branches, as big as a bushel basket. We broke it open, and found it a covered gallery, swarming with life. Brown ant-like creatures, white maggot-like creatures, of several shapes and sizes, were hurrying up and down, as busy as human beings in Cheapside. They were Termites, 'white ants'—of which of the many species I know not—and the lump above was their nest. But why they should find it wisest to perch ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Meg and me, How we love, and how we 'gree, I care na by how few may see; Whistle o'er the lave o't.— Wha I wish were maggot's meat, Dish'd up in her winding sheet, I could write—but Meg maun see't— Whistle o'er the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... district this was called free-thinking, and many people looked upon this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; it made him profoundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot of which he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his life-blood. In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies written in a bad, unintelligible hand-writing, but with great feeling, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the latter. How we groaned when we saw any more crab being brought over from the Wolf! Bully beef, every variety of bean, dried vegetables, dried fish that audibly announced its advent to the table, bean soup, and pea soup (maggot soup would often have been a more correct description), we got just as sick of, till, long before the end, all the food served nauseated us. Tea, sometimes made in a coffee-pot, sometimes even with salt water, ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... at present to enjoy the sight of your torture, and the music of your groans. Back to your dungeon, dog; yet stay—the dwarf may kill you, and thus cheat me of my revenge; it is not safe to confine you with him any longer. Maggot and Bloodhound, take Sydney and shut him up in the ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the insect passes before it comes to be a butterfly. The maggot or worm having ceased to eat, fixes itself in some place till its skin separates, and discovers a horny, oblong body, which is ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... lacked robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at bottom intensely practical, said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt, himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine complexioned and shrill voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this last-mentioned trait of Shelley ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... does at every step of his reasoning is to read his own feelings and desires into nature. The design he talks so glibly about is in him, not outside of him. As well might a maggot in a cheese argue that the world was designed for him because the agreement between his structure and it are so harmonious. In relation to their surroundings man and the maggot are in the same position. And in the economy of nature man is of no more consequence than the maggot. There is a more ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... animal with a queer, hammer-shaped head and long black legs. Its body was drawn out and knotted like an enormous maggot. It lay twisted to one side ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... ladies and gentlemen, some 22 years ago, I believe it was, I attended one of your meetings at the Experiment Station in Geneva, and at that time I gave a little talk on the walnut husk maggot. Perhaps some of you are old enough to have been there and remembered something about it, or maybe you are old enough so that you have forgotten as much as I have, so it would be worth talking over again. At any rate, when the chairman of your program ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... cutting-edges. He, who all his days had looked on naked Life, had never seen so much of Life's nakedness before. For the first time he experienced a doubt of his own glorious personality. For the moment Life faltered and forgot to lie. After all, he was a little earth-maggot, just like all the other earth-maggots, like the squirrel he had eaten, like the other men he had seen fail and die, like Joe Hines and Henry Finn, who had already failed and were surely dead, like Elijah lying there uncaring, with his skinned face, in the bottom ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... was, at first a wraith, a suggestion on the point of vanishing, and then illuminated and embodied, a celestial maggot stuck to the round of a cloud like a caterpillar to the edge of a leaf. We gazed at it silently, I cannot say for how long. The beam of light might have pinned the bright larva to the sky for the inspection of interested Londoners. Then somebody ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... santo yonder has a hollow trunk, and in it there are usually ants, which are called fire-ants. They bite horribly. It feels like a drop of molten metal on your flesh. And it festers afterwards. And there is a fly, the berni fly, which lays its eggs in living flesh. The maggot eats its way within. I do not know much about the jungle, but my father has—had a fazenda in Matto Grosso and I was there as a child. The camaradas told me ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... from his reason and seated a fatuous, chattering, impotent, lecherous ape where his intellect should have been. And he knew he was a fool. He knew that he was stark mad. Yet what he did not know was that this madness was a culmination, not a pristine passion new born in his heart. For the maggot in his brain had eaten out a rotten place wherein was the memory of many women's yieldings, of many women's tears. One side of his brain worked with rare cunning. He wound the evidence against the men in the mine, taken at the coroner's hearing, through the labyrinth of the law, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... bluebottle, and lives in huts and dwellings. But his ways are different, for he bites a hole into one's skin, usually the back or arms, and lays an egg therein. In about ten days this egg develops into a fully grown larva, in other words a white maggot with a black head. It looks for all the world like a boil until one squeezes it and pushes the squirming head outside. But woe to him who having squeezed lets go to get the necessary forceps; for ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... Mistress,' 'A Box like an Egg,' 'Two Soldiers killing one another for a Groat,' 'A Pair of Breeches,' 'A Cow's Tail'—there's titles for you! Cow's tail, indeed! And here, look you, is the author's portrait for a frontispiece, with a laurel-wreath in his hair and a maggot in place of a parting! 'Maggots'! He began with 'em and he'll end with 'em. Maggots!" He slammed the two covers of the book together and tossed it ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "How she got the maggot into her head," presently resumes Lady Hannah's spouse, "I can't think. I did suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora Corr—woman who managed to burn her own and a lot of other people's fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid business—had ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... brother butterfly of fashionable life! While yet an embryo, a worm, he grubs his way through a good estate, and not a little ready money. Then, after a long sojourn in the pupa or puppy state—longer far than that of any other maggot—he emerges a perfect butterfly, vain, empty, fluttering, and conceited, idling, flirting, flaunting, philandering, until the summer of his ton is past, when he dies, or is arrested, and expiates a life of puerile vanity in Purgatory ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... devour every kind of vegetable production. The insect is first generated in the earth, from the eggs deposited by the fly in its perfect state. In about three months, the insects contained in these eggs break the shell, and crawl forth in the shape of a grub or maggot, which feeds upon the roots of vegetables, and continues in this state of secret annoyance for more than three years, gradually growing to the size of an acorn. It is the thick white maggot with a red head, so frequently ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... a maggot in it," mused Billy: "three parts rotten, the rest sweet. An' all owing to fantastic inventions an' new ways of believin' in God wi'out church-gwaine, as parson said Sunday. Such things do certainly Play hell with human nature, in a manner ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... 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; pebble, grain of sand; molehill, button, bubble. point; atom &c (small ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... will, said Epistemon, at this time that we ought to bestir ourselves and help our seamen, on the penalty of being drowned, seems to me as idle and ridiculous a maggot as that of some of Caesar's men, who, at their coming into the Gauls, were mightily busied in making wills and codicils; bemoaned their fortune and the absence of their spouses and friends at Rome, when it was absolutely necessary for ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... softening grin, "to hasten me so, and then to hear me out o' window, because Bob hath a sweeter pipe. Ah, he can whistle like a blackbird, too, and gain a lot of money; but there, what good? He sacrifices it all to the honor of his heart, first maggot that cometh into it; and he done the very same with Rickon Goold, the Methody galley-raker. We never was so softy when I were afloat. But your honor shall hear, and give judgment ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore |
