"Maggot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... mild a name; Does he forget from whence he came; Has he forgot from whence he sprung; A mushroom in a bed of dung; A maggot in a cake of fat, The offspring of a beggar's brat. As eels delight to creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood in mud delights to run; Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... humbling influence of love on the haughty harvest-mouse, we are touched by the sensibility of the tender-hearted ant, and may profit by the moral of 'the disobedient maggot.' The drawings ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... 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 found in turning up the soil. At the end of the fourth year, they emerge ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... a face at them all, and gave their books to the Salvation Army and read the Diary of Maggot Somebody. ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... 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, was the usual hot drink provided, but coffee was for some time available once a day. ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... nursing bees begins. In two or three days each egg has become a tiny maggot or larva, and the nursing bees put into its cell a mixture of pollen and honey which they have prepared in their own mouths, thus making a kind of sweet bath in which the larva lies. In five or six days the larva grows so fat upon this that it nearly ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... she has got a missionary maggot in her head. It's feeding on all the little brains she ever had. She wants to go out as a teacher and preacher to the red heathen, and spend her life and her fortune among them. She wants to do as Rule did, and, I suppose, die as Rule died. Oh, ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... instead. However produced, the effect is singular in its wild beauty. The soil of this island is poor for any purpose but growing timber; the inhabitants consequently are not many, and they live on roots and fish and what we should think still poorer food—a great wood maggot, which is found in plenty. There are but four villages, two of them Christian. I staid there one night and the next day, giving them all I could; and it was a good time to me. The day after I returned home. O sweet gospel of Christ! which is lighting up ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... was a good lad, though not good enough for her, and that she ought to treat him kindly. But she said my lecture had given her an alarm, lest Franz should have got the same maggot into his head." ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... uncle with the freedom of professional artistes, and yet with considerable charms of manner, and addressing him in firm and sonorous voices. What the deuce of a strange tongue they speak! Only now and then does it sound at all like German. My uncle doesn't understand a word; embarrassed, mute as a maggot, he steps back and points to the sofa. They sit down, talk together—it sounds like music itself. At length they succeed in making my good uncle comprehend that they are singers on a tour; they would like to give a concert in the place, and have come to ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... happiness? You've got 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 ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... Perhaps suggested by a line in Green's Hermitage, quoted in a letter of Gray to Walpole: "From maggot-youth through change of state," etc. ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... to supply the furnishing of that room!—And, after all, is not the most any human creature dare hope for the more or less dusty corner of some museum shelf at last? The passion of the heart testified to by some battered trinket, the sweat of the brain by some maggot-eaten manuscript, the agony of death, at best, by some round shot turned up by the ploughshare? And how shall any one dare complain of this, since have not empires before now only been saved from oblivion by a few buried potsherds, and whole races of mankind by childish ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... 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, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... '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
... We would like to have secured Carpathian walnuts, but the nuts from known sources of supply were so discolored with husk maggot that we were ashamed to send them out. We were not able to locate and to furnish any considerable amount of any kind of northern nuts. Twelve thousand of these kits went out, and each one of them is in a position where it probably contacted ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... about the last man in Paradise, always excepting Major Dabney," he said half-musingly. "Haven't you often wondered what sort of a maggot it is that gets into the human brain to ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell d'Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show, Maggot O'Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon (Lord Mayor of Dublin), Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder, an unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon Dedalus, Andrew (Pisser) Burke, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... her steadily. "We shan't have far to seek," he said, "and that old fool Fusby's got a maggot in his head. Why, the fellow's gone to London; Parliament meets to-morrow, I saw it in ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... shepherd, he told Mahony, and, if he had called the tune, he would have lived and died one. But the wife had had ambitions, the children were growing up, and every one knew what it was when women got a maggot in their heads. There had been no peace for him till he had chucked his twelve-year-old job and joined the rush to Mount Alexander. But at heart he had remained a bushman; and he was now all on the side of the squatters in their tussle with the Crown. He knew a bit, he'd make ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Ruth," he said, "I don't wish to say anything against Isaac, and I don't want to make you uneasy, but you know as well as I do that he has a strange maggot in his brain. When I first heard him talk, I thought of him as a sort of fanatic. It seems to me that he has changed. I am not sure that such changes as have taken place in him lately have ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that maggot, are you? Debating with yourself about giving me up, eh? Well that's a matter you must settle with your conscience, if you indulge in the ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... descriptions of the curious trees and plants and animals I saw in the West Indies. There is one, however, which I must describe. I was asking Mr Merton one day the meaning of the name of our schooner. He laughed, and said that grogo is the name of a big maggot which is found in the Cockarito palm or cabbage tree. This maggot is the grub of a large black beetle. It grows to the length of four inches, and is as thick as a man's thumb. Though its appearance is not very attractive, it is considered a ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... he foamed. "I'll—well square you, you lump o lard with the heart of a maggot!" He stopped, steadying down ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... deeply cultivating and thoroughly enriching in the fall, leaving the ground rough and uneven for the deep action of frost, and by sowing the seed VERY early in spring. I have found that the insect usually attacks late-sown and feeble plants. If the maggot were in my garden, I should ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... of the third moon, the nutmegs bloom; A maggot, lo, works hard to pierce into a flower; But though it ceaseless bores it cannot penetrate. So crouching on the buds, it swing-like rocks itself. My precious pet, my own dear little darling, If I don't choose to open how can ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... said he, on one occasion, "which reminds me of a man who was always ready to go in for dangerous work. His name was Old Maggot. He was not really old, but he had a son named after himself, and his friends had to distinguish him from ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... was there already, on her way down. Ay, a strange creature, Oline, crawling about fat and round as a maggot, and over seventy years and all, but still getting about. She sits drinking coffee in the hut, but seeing the men come up, all must give way to ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... measures looking toward the eradication of the fly or the proper disposal of manure will aid in the control and eradication of this worm. The United States Bureau of Entomology has shown that fly maggots travel downward through a manure pile as it comes time for the maggot to enter the ground and pupate, and an excellent maggot trap, consisting of an exposed manure platform raised on posts which are set in a concrete basin extending under the platform and filled with three or four inches of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... imperceptible sounds which are confounded, on a fine summer day, in an immense murmuring. The bumble-bee has his song as well as the nightingale, the honey-bee is the warbler of the mosses, the cricket is the lark of the tall grass, the maggot is the wren—it has only a sigh, but ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... proceedings, I never saw the like, specially as he hoodwinked them right along, and acted worse, even, than before. You can imagine Captain Coe's feelings when, rounding up a three months' cruise, he found this six-foot-three of black devil and hypocrite snugged in the Mission house like a maggot in a breadfruit. They say he went on awful, speaking out the truth before them all, and daring Afiola to deny it. But Mrs. Tweedie she got him outside on the veranda, walking up and down with her arm through ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... question of my right over you—though I HAVE some right, remember. I want to know, I only want to know what it is that subjugates you to that little scum of a sculptor downstairs, what it is that brings you down like a humble maggot, in worship of him. I want to know ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... tarrying, Primasso, having eaten the second cake, began upon the third, and this again was reported to the Abbot, who fell a-pondering in himself and saying, "Alack, what new maggot is this that is come into my head to-day? What avarice! What despite! And for whom? This many a year have I given my substance to eat to whosoever had a mind thereto, without regarding if he were gentle or simple, poor or rich, merchant or huckster, and have seen it with ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... taking a pear. It was a fine pear with a maggot in it; they wanted me to take another but I knew that those with maggots are usually the best. Not seeing why I should not be a poet also, I ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... bring the Bishop's name into the business; we know he can have nothing to do with such 5 horrors; we know that he is a saint and all that a bishop should be, who is a great man beside. Oh, were but every worm a maggot, Every fly a grig, Every bough a Christmas faggot, Every tune a jig! In fact, I have abjured all religions; but the last I inclined to was the Armenian: for 10 I have traveled, do you see, and at Koenigsberg, Prussia Improper (so styled ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... than in Africa. The wretched insects plunge in that sharp instrument of theirs, pierce the skin, and leave an egg underneath; the warmth of the body hatches it into what we fishing boys called a gentle, and that white maggot goes on eating and growing under the poor animal's coat, living on hot meat always till it is full-grown, when its skin dries up and turns reddish-brown, and it lies still for a bit, before changing into a fly, which escapes ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... analogy between the insect and his 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 or the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... now is too lamentable a face for a man, Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing for it, Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... pure love of Madame the duchess that you risk your head? Come, as you say; admit that you wish to see my hand without showing yours. A baton is not much for me, as you have hinted, but it is all that was promised me. And you, if we win, will still be minister of finances? What is that maggot I see behind your eyes? Is it not spelled 'chancellor'? But, remember, Madame has friends to take care of in the event of our success. We can not have all the spoils. To join the kingdom and the duchy will create new offices, ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... Blockhead, sluggard, dullard, dreamer, Shirker, shuffler, crawler, creeper, Sniffler, snuffler, wailer, weeper, Earthworm, maggot, tadpole, weevil! Set upon thy course of evil, Lest the King of Spectre-land Set ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... and limbs are preyed upon by millions of scale insects and borers, the leaves are devastated by the all-devouring leaf worms, canker worms and tent caterpillars, while the fruit itself is attacked by the codling moth, curculio and apple maggot. To destroy fruit is to take money out of the farmer's pocket, and to attack and injure the tree is like undermining his house itself. By an annual expenditure of about $8,250,000 in cash for spraying ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... far distant. "The palo 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 much ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... with us, its foliage, as well as that of most other Crowfoots, is liable to be disfigured, and sometimes nearly destroyed, by a very small maggot which feeds betwixt, the coats of the leaf, and which ultimately produces a small fly, called by ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... 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 ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... beneath. The desolation and decay impress themselves on all the senses. The air has a mouldering smell, and an earthy taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will seam and roughen a smooth hand. If ever Ghosts act plays, they act them on this ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... if you recollect a little, is no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him—'Tis the sporting little filly-folly which carries you out for the present hour—a maggot, a butterfly, a picture, a fiddlestick—an uncle Toby's siege—or an any thing, which a man makes a shift to get a-stride on, to canter it away from the cares and solicitudes of life—'Tis as useful a beast as is in the whole creation—nor do I really see how the world ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... is occupied by an Halictus in course of metamorphosis, becomes the height of absurdity when the Gnat has passed that way. Instinct does not hesitate in the face of this ineptitude: it seals up emptiness. I say, emptiness, because the crafty maggot hastens to decamp the instant that the victuals are consumed, as though it foresaw an insuperable obstacle for the coming Fly: it quits the cell before ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... some sprigs of nobility were dining together at a tavern, they took the following conceit into their heads after dinner. One of them observing a maggot come from a filbert, which seemed to be uncommonly large, attempted to get it from his companion, who, not choosing to let it go, was immediately offered five guineas for it, which was accepted. He then proposed to run it against ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... atrophied. Its snout is sunk in the tissue of the plants of which it absorbs the sap. The whole psychic life of these inert female parasites consists in the pleasure they experience from sucking the sap of the plant and in sexual intercourse with the males. It is the same with the maggot-like females of the fan-fly (Strepsitera), which spend their lives parasitically and immovably, without wings or feet, in the abdomen of wasps. There is no question here of higher psychic action. If we compare these sluggish parasites with the intelligent ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... 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
... cases he found that the blow-flies had worked havoc, so that, working single-handed, he had a great deal to do; and by the time he had thrown a number of lusty calves and treated their sides with his bottle of maggot medicine, he had pretty well worn-out the day. Being done, he turned his attention to a cow which had become deeply involved in a boggy water-hole. He threw the rope over her horns and pulled with his pony this way and that, but without success. Finally, when the sun ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... stiffened for a supreme effort. "I ain't nobody. Woodticks ain't got nothin' on me when it comes to humility. I'm a worm, a maggot, brother to the pollywog an' child of the blow-fly. I ain't afraid or ashamed of nothin' that creeps or crawls or stinks. But travel with that mistake of creation! Go 'way, man. I ain't proud, but you ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... God, Miss Polwarth," returned Wingfold eagerly, "then is he God everywhere, and not a maggot can die any more than a Shakespeare be born without him. He is either enough, that is, all in all, or he is not ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... that a good crop does not occur more frequently than once in three years. A prolonged drought in summer may cause the greater part of the small fruit to fall off the trees. A warm and wet autumn will subject the fruit to the ravages of a maggot or worm, which eats its way into it. Fruit thus injured falls to the ground prematurely, and the oil made from it is of very bad quality, being nauseous in taste and somewhat thick and viscous. Frost following immediately on a fall of snow ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... all my ears of corn were infested with maggot, growing fat thereon. Can you help me scare ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... remarked to me, that at least one half of it had been destroyed, in which opinion I concurred; in examining that which remained, we were of opinion that three-fourths of it had from three to ten flies in the maggot state on each stalk; in this state of things I surrendered all hope of any tolerable return, more especially as the rust made its appearance in it a short time before ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... developed into branching corallines; and so on in an endless cycle. The belief in the essential identity of the process of alternate generation and of ordinary metamorphosis has been greatly strengthened by Wagner's discovery of the larva or maggot of a fly, namely the Cecidomyia, producing asexually other larvae, and these others, which finally are developed into mature males and females, propagating their kind in the ordinary ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... maybe? Just for a maggot, I'll wager—like my good lady, Mrs. Toole.' A nearer glance at his dress had satisfied Toole that he was too much of a maccaroni for an artist, and he was thinking of placing him upon the lord lieutenant's staff. 'We've capital horses here, if you want to go on to ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... no small consternation, resolving to take journey home. But it not being time to rise, he fell asleep, and dreaming the same thing over again, awaking all in a sweat. The doubling of the dream he took for a clear call to go home, and telling the dream to Mr. Ogle, (who called it a maggot) he excused himself the best way he could to the laird and lady, to whom he was to preach, and went off. About a mile and a half from his own house, he met Torwoodlee's man, who said, O Sir, you are long looked for at your house: which made him ask what was ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... never enjoy the benefit of his position as successor to the crown of Karague, that he took some magic powders and charmed away his life. His remains were then taken to Moga-Namirinzi, in the same manner as were those of Dagara; but, as an improvement on the maggot story, a young lion emerged from the heart of the corpse and kept guard over the hill, from whom other lions came into existence, until the whole place has become infested by them, and has since made Karague a power and dread to all other nations; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... ay, an' some says no; but I believe myself, that he has, like his father, both good and bad in him; for the ould man, if the maggot bit him, or that if he took the notion, would do one a good turn; an' if he took a likin' to you, he'd go any lin'th to sarve you; but, then, you were never sure of him—nor he didn't himself know this minute what ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... "Why, what blamed maggot have you got in your head, son?" he inquired, laying his heavy hand on the boy's shoulder. "You didn't use to hate school so, and, as sure as you're born, you'll find it first rate sport when you get back. It's this Blake business, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... president of all the Dryasdusts in Europe. No. Let us not part with our old belief in honest Joe Miller, but trust rather to Mr. Morley, the historian of Bartlemy Fair, and visit the Great Theatrical Booth over against the Hospital gate of St. Bartholomew, where Joe, probably, is to dance "the English Maggot dance," and after the appearance of "two Harlequins, conclude with a Grand Dance and Chorus, accompanied with Kettledrums and Trumpets." And when the Fair is over, and we are no longer invited to "walk up," let us march ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon |
