"Spiny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... twice last night into the bush. The rain has washed the ground away from under its off legs, so that it tilts; and there were quantities of large longicorn beetles about during the night—the sort with spiny backs; they kept on getting themselves hitched on to my blankets and when I wanted civilly to remove them they made a horrid fizzing noise and showed fight— cocking their horns in a defiant way. I awake finally about 5 A.M. soaked through to the skin. The waterproof sheet has had a label ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... silence gave to her! You never knew what strange thoughts were going on behind that proud taciturnity. She showed the guests to chairs, of which a great many, mostly already filled, stood about the center table, on which sprawled the great, spiny, unlovely plant. Marise sat down, taking little Mark on her knees. Elly leaned against her. Paul sat close beside old Mr. Welles. Their eyes were on the big pink bud enthroned in the uncomeliness of the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... got it all right enough. I give you my word that spiny one got it; but, save for that one first little cry, he took his punishment in grim and terrible silence, fighting with a blind fury that was awful to behold. What happened to him underneath there in those few brief, terrible seconds no one will ever ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... and tigers, tamed by skilled trainers, looked at the crowds with green and seemingly sleepy eyes; but at moments they raised their giant heads, and breathed through wheezing nostrils the exhalations of the multitude, licking their jaws the while with spiny tongues. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... but it's no matter; he can go up to-morrow and see my father. He has come over here to tomahawk papa, very likely—or buy out his claim. This thing would have excited me, a while back; but it has only one interest for me now, and only one value. I can say to—to— Spine, Spiny, Spinal—I don't like any form of that name!—I can say to him to-morrow, 'Don't try to keep it up any more, or I shall have to tell you whom I have been talking with last night, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats, gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled, and devoured ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... stem, along which, or towards the end of which and its branches, the generally fleshy leaves are borne. They are much cultivated as ornamental plants, especially in public buildings and gardens, for their stiff, rugged habit. The leaves are generally lance-shaped with a sharp apex and a spiny margin; but vary in colour from grey to bright green, and are sometimes striped or mottled. The rather small tubular yellow or red flowers are borne on simple or branched leafless stems and are generally densely clustered. The juice of the leaves of certain species yields aloes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... riding beneath a kind of cliff. To his right, on the east of the trail, the boulders were smaller and scattered, like a handful of great marbles flung across the cactus plain. He may have glanced toward this side especially, at the clumps of spiny growth over the pradera, and caught glimpses behind the strewn rocks, but his look was casual, unstartled. He breathed deeply, though. The old familiar elation set him vaguely quivering and tingling, with nervous, subtle desire. The young animal's excess of life surged into ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... exceeding 100 feet, but is intersected by deep ravines with perpendicular sides, which vary from 100 to 600 feet in depth. The upper rock is sandstone, and the soil on it very poor and sandy, producing small eucalypti, hakea, grevillia, and a sharp spiny grass (triodia); this is the spinifex of Captain Sturt and other Australian explorers. The character of the country is similar to that of the interior of some parts ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... straight, sharp, wedge-shaped bill, just calculated for cutting out chips; the very long horn-tipped tongue for thrusting into the holes he makes; the peculiar arrangement of toes, two forward and two back; and the stiff, spiny tail-feathers for supporting himself against the side of a tree as he works. But getting his living so means hard work, and he has discovered for himself a much easier way. One now frequently surprises him on the ground in old ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... of finger size will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by pink five-petaled bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees find their way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of fruit too often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny, tap-rooted shrubs are resistant ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... Maritime claims: exclusive fishing zone: 200 nm territorial sea: 12 nm International disputes: none Climate: tropical; marine; moderated by trade winds; sunny and relatively dry Terrain: low, flat limestone; extensive marshes and mangrove swamps Natural resources: spiny lobster, conch Land use: arable land: 2% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 98% Irrigated land: NA km2 Environment: 30 islands (eight inhabited); ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... when I started for Castel del Monte. It was spring, and I was going to see my love. The land about on either side, as I went, was faintly flushed with peach-blossom shining among the hoary stones. By the cliff edge the spiny cactus threw out strange withered arms. A whitethorn without spike or spine gracefully wept floods ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... Books, with their stories of the atrocities of the enemy, ad nauseam, will come upon the criminating Official Documents of various nations that sought to propagandize the world into trembling, cowering belief in a new dragon. Bolshevism with wide-spread sable wings, thrashing his spiny tail and snorting fire from his nostrils was volplaning upon the people of earth with open red mouth and cruel fangs and horrid maw down which he would gulp all the political, economic and religious liberties won from the centuries past. The dragon ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... belongs to the prickly pear family, but there resemblance ceases. It is a stocky bush two or three feet high covered with balls of flattened powerful sharp-pointed needles which will penetrate even a heavy shoe. In November these fall, strewing the ground with spiny indestructible weapons. There are many varieties of chollas and all are decorative. The tree cholla grows from seven to ten feet in height, a splendid showy feature of the desert slopes, and the home, fortress, and ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... I was very unwell and could not go far from the house. The country was covered with low spiny shrubs and acacias, except in a little valley where a stream came down from the hills, where some fine trees and bushes shaded the water and formed a very pleasant place to ramble up. There were plenty of birds about, and of a tolerable variety of species; but very few of them were gaily coloured. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... high. The divisions of the leaflets are rather narrower, and somewhat more hoary, than those of the Common Cardoon. The ribs are longer, and the whole plant stronger and generally more spiny; though, on the whole, comparatively smooth. It is not, however, always very readily distinguished from the Common or Large Smooth Cardoon. It runs up to seed quicker ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... known that the Duckbill or Platypus (Ornithorhyncus) and the Spiny Anteater (Echidna) of Australia and Tasmania—with one representative of the latter in New Guinea, which seems to have been still connected—are semi-reptilian survivors of the first animals to suckle ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... rolling prairie, the stalking was far more difficult. Every hollow, every earth hummock and sagebush had to be used as cover. The hunter wriggled through the grass flat on his face, pushing himself along for perhaps a quarter of a mile by his toes and fingers, heedless of the spiny cactus. When near enough to the huge, unconscious quarry the hunter began firing, still keeping himself carefully concealed. If the smoke was blown away by the wind, and if the buffaloes caught no glimpse of the assailant, they would often stand motionless and stupid until ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... feed on corn blades, and last summer undoubtedly lived in that very field. When I studied Io history in my moth books, I learned these caterpillars ate willow, wild cherry, hickory, plum, oak, sassafras, ash, and poplar. The caterpillar was green, more like the spiny butterfly caterpillars than any moth one I know. It had brown and white bands, brown patches, and was covered with tufts of stiff upstanding spines that pierced like sharp needles. This was not because the caterpillar tried to ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the spiny lobster, has no true claws, but huge hairy antennae. These lobsters are red during their lifetime! I have seen them (in the Crystal Palace Aquarium) seated exactly as here described, with blue lobsters watching them ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing |
