"Spiny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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); subject ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... vast slough and occasional stagnant pools showed what the state of things would be a couple of months hence. The properties were divided by hedges of agave—huge growths, grandly curving their sword-pointed leaves. Its companion, the spiny cactus, writhed here and there among juniper bushes and tamarisks. Along the wayside rose tall, dead thistles, white with age, their great cluster of seed-vessels showing how fine the flower had been. Above our heads, peewits were wheeling and crying, ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... fascination Nelly's 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
... 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 ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... 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
... the ancient walls, A measured phrase of bells. And in the silence I hear a woman's voice make answer then: "Well, they are green, although no ship can sail them.... Sky-larks rest in the grass, and start up singing Before the girl who stoops to pick sea-poppies. Spiny, the poppies are, and oh how yellow! And the brown clay is runneled by the rain...." A moment since, the sheep that crop the grass Had long blue shadows, and the grass-tips sparkled: Now all grows old.... O voices strangely speaking, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... the disgrace—to my disgrace I say it—I dread most. You'd be up to my reason if you had ever served in a regiment. I mean, discipline—if ever you'd known discipline—in the police if you like—anything—anywhere where there's what we used to call spiny de cor. I mean, at school. And I'm," said Van Diemen, "a rank idiot double D. dolt, and flat as a pancake, and transparent as a pane of glass. You see through me. Anybody could. I can't talk of my botheration ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... baskets of smelts—neat little baskets, pretty as those used for strawberries, and exhaling a strong scent of violets. And meantime the tiny black eyes of the shrimps dotted as with beads of jet their soft-toned mass of pink and grey; and spiny crawfish and lobsters striped with black, all still alive, raised a grating sound as they tried to crawl along with ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... coming of the animals to defile them. Round about may be noted signs of recent excavations; here the earth is sunken, there it forms a low mound. There grow in all their luxuriance the tarambulo to prick the feet with its spiny berries and the pandakaki to add its odor to that of the cemetery, as if the place did not have smells enough already. Yet the ground is sprinkled with a few little flowers which, like those skulls, are known only to their Creator; their petals ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... and pendent branches of small berry-like fruit; the palmetto, with its tender succulent bud on the summit of the stem, used as a vegetable, and proving an excellent substitute for cabbage; the thorny icari, or cari—a variety of fan-palm. Its spiny stems and leaves, which cut like razors, make it difficult to approach. Its bunches of bright chestnut-brown fruit hang from between the leaves which form its crown, each bunch about a foot ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... already, and in this remote village his person had been invested with mysterious powers. He was a force of which they read, rather than a living, breathing man, so that however he might try to talk affably and communicably, he found himself hedged about with a spiny growth of fame that the others made but little attempt to penetrate. His garment of authority and influence was too great. He was too ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... conical, pyramidal; mucronate[obs3], mucronated[obs3]; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform[obs3], peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated[obs3]; cornute[obs3], cornuted[obs3], cornicultate[obs3]; prickly; spiny, spinous[obs3], spicular; thorny, bristling, muricated[obs3], pectinated[obs3], studded, thistly, briary[obs3]; craggy &c. (rough) 256; snaggy, digitated[obs3], two-edged, fusiform[Microb]; dentiform[obs3], denticulated; toothed; odontoid[obs3]; starlike; stellated[obs3], stelliform[obs3]; sagittate[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... lay stretched out below, and there seemed to be no safe spot whereon to land. The foul, deep swamp that reached for miles on every side, the towering trees that sprouted their spiny trunks and limbs from it, the interlaced razor-edged vines and creeper-growths—all was a stirring welter of tropic life, life varied and voracious and untamed. From the tiny poisonous bansi insects layers deep on the nearest tree to the monster gantor that crouched in a clump of weeds, ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... cultivated, the wild, one distinguished by long spines on the branches, and a fourth destitute of these spines, and called by the natives female sago. This and the cultivated species afford the best farina; the spiny variety, which has a slender trunk, and the wild tree, yield but an inferior quality of sago. The farinaceous matter afforded by each plant is very considerable, 500 lbs. being a frequent quantity, while 300 lbs. may be taken as the common average ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... but once a year. One place it never comes, and that is here. Here, in these pages no good wishes spring, No well-worn greetings tediously ring— For Christmas greetings are like pots of ore: The hollower they are they ring the more. Here shall no holly cast a spiny shade, Nor mistletoe my solitude invade, No trinket-laden vegetable come, No jorum steam with Sheolate of rum. No shrilling children shall their voices rear. Hurrah ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... legs.[28] The lion would hardly recognise himself in the ant-lion or the sea-lion, still less in the chameleon, lit. earth-lion, the first element of which occurs also in camomile, earth-apple. The guinea-pig is not a pig, nor does it come from Guinea (see p. 51). Porcupine means "spiny pig." It has an extraordinary number of early variants, and Shakespeare wrote it porpentine. One Mid. English form was porkpoint. The French name has hesitated between spine and spike. The modern form is porc-epic, but Palsgrave has "porkepyn a beest, porc espin." Porpoise is from ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... and the air was chill, but they were certainly nowhere near the polar regions, for there was no trace of snow to be seen anywhere. All about them was sand, with here and there a spiny shrub standing up ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... the undulations not 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
... and, between the legs of various animals, to capture the flies that infest them in the soft, tender parts of their bodies. A glance at the bird's great gaping mouth should be sufficient to convince anybody that it was meant for nothing else but catching flies, and the spiny fringe of hair at the side for caging them there when caught. In some places it is called the 'night-hawk,' and I should scarcely think there is any bird that has more names ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn |
