"Voracity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these birds as they fly along the coast appear like clouds. When their vast numbers, their extraordinary voracity, and the facility with which they procure their food, are considered, one cannot be surprised at the magnitude of the beds of Guano, which have resulted from uninterrupted accumulations during many thousands of years. I kept for some days a living Sula ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... some pretty big mosquitoes in New Jersey and on Long Island, but, if report of their ancestry is true, they have degenerated in size and voracity; for the grandfather of all mosquitoes used to live in the neighborhood of Fort Onondaga, New York, and sallying out whenever he was hungry, would eat an Indian or two and pick his teeth with their ribs. The red men had no arms that could prevail against it, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Thanksgiving dinner,—he keeps on eating as long as the supplies last. The gobbler, in one of these raids, does not condescend to grab a single grasshopper,—at least, not while anybody is watching him. But I suppose he makes up for it when his dignity cannot be injured by having spectators of his voracity; perhaps he falls upon the grasshoppers when they are driven into a corner of the field. But he is only fattening himself for destruction; like all greedy persons, he comes to a bad end. And if the turkeys had any Sunday-school, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... eater's food— A sympathetic feeling. Not of love! And be there ale, or wine, or potent draught Superior to them both, to that I fly, And glory in the certainty that mine Is the ethereal soul of food, while his Is but the rank corporeal—the vile husks Best suited to his crude voracity. And far as the bright spirit may transcend Its mortal frame, my food ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... quivering with life, among the lifeless heap of his victims lying at the bottom of his boat. The sea gulls, hovering about shrieking shrilly and pouncing upon the heads and entrails as they were thrown into the water, fighting over them and gulping them down with hungry voracity, seemed to heighten this picture of the ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... 1951, they descended upon the tree during the first week of July and destroyed all nuts of the large crop within two weeks. These nuts could not possibly have been filled and, consequently, could have been of little nutrient value. In their voracity, the squirrels frequently work on the cages and sometimes manage to break through. To facilitate this endeavor, limbs up to one inch in diameter carrying cages are sometimes cut off so the squirrels can attack ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... stem with one of their feet, and then with their powerful arms pulled it down, a matter of not much difficulty with so loosely formed a stem as that of the plantain. They then set upon the juicy heart of the trees at the bases of the leaves, and devoured it with great voracity. While eating they made a kind of clucking noise, expressive of contentment. Many trees they destroyed apparently out of pure mischief. Now and then they stood still and looked around. Once or twice they seemed on the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... for days, he lies sleeping in his smoky wigwam without the means of appeasing hunger; then rises and follows his game with the fierceness of a tiger, until the object of his pursuit is overtaken; after which, with the voracity of a dog, he loads his stomach with food sufficient to satisfy the cravings of nature, for as many days as he had previously fasted, and again betakes himself to sleep and inactivity. With all this irregularity, he is a ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... P——s, with whose amiable family I have latterly dined, was a cup of rose-water and eau de Cologne, with patches of the rice paper of China, wherewith to allay the intolerable itching that attends the puncture of these winged leeches, whose voracity is incredible. I have at times caught a villain in the act, and watched with patience until from one of the veins of the hand he had drunk blood enough to blow out his little carcase to the shape of a tennis-ball, when he would poise himself ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... tails and leopard spots) slid rapidly to their holes; prairie-dogs sat like sentinels upon their mounds and barked like angry puppies; great pink-and-gray grasshoppers, so fat that they could hardly waddle, indulged their voracity; and brown crickets and butterflies were seen on every side. An antelope disappears in the distance: a brigand-like horseman rides up and asks the way. He is a suspicious-looking character, and pistols are cocked. We have not our full escort, and are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... soldiers. The discipline of these troops was admirable; they were much beloved by the inhabitants, who recounted with delight numerous instances of their humanity and moderation. In this respect they formed a striking contrast to the Prussians, whose abuses and voracity were uniformly spoken of in terms of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... and hunger rendered palatable, steaks, roasted on the coals, were supplied in liberal abundance, and disappeared before Evan Dhu and their host with a promptitude that seemed like magic, and astonished Waverley, who was much puzzled to reconcile their voracity with what he had heard of the abstemiousness of the Highlanders. He was ignorant that this abstinence was with the lower ranks wholly compulsory, and that, like some animals of prey, those who practise it were usually gifted with the power of indemnifying themselves to good purpose ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... one by one the sharks seemed to disappear. They could not, how- ever, have gone far away, and it was not likely that any- thing in the shape of bait dropped near them would long escape their keen voracity. ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... which he painted, and very perfect the harmony that he gave to his works, for which he has been ever esteemed by craftsmen and honoured by our modern masters with consummate praise; nay, so long as the voracity of time allows his many excellent labours to live, he will be held in veneration by every age. In Prato, near Florence, where he had some relatives, he stayed for many months, executing many works throughout that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... they halted for breakfast, which Larry O'Dowd prepared with his accustomed celerity, and assisted to consume with his wonted voracity. ...
— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne
... even as that involved pair of bleeding recollections looked on the life lost to them. I knew well what a height she dropped from when the senses took fire. She raised me to learn how little of fretful thirst and its reputed voracity remains with love when it has been met midway in air by a winged mate able to sustain, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chiefly on the superficies of their bodies, to which we may add the negative proof arising from the absence of sensibility. It is well known, that the two halves of a divided insect have continued to perform, or attempt, each their separate functions, the trunkless head feeding with its accustomed voracity, while the headless trunk has exhibited its appropriate excitability to ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with the dregs of the townsfolk, they murdered with great brutality General Prina, the Minister of Finance, whose remarkable abilities had been devoted towards raising funds for the Imperial Exchequer. Personally incorruptible, Prina was looked upon as the general representative of French voracity; he met his death with the utmost calmness, only praying that he might be the last victim. No one else was, in fact, killed, and next day quiet was resumed, but the affair had another victim—Italy. You cannot change horses when ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... utter absence of Self-Control; and therefore we never attribute either of these states to Brutes (except metaphorically, and whenever any one kind of animal differs entirely from another in insolence, mischievousness, or voracity), because they have not moral choice or process of deliberation, but are quite different from that kind of creature just as are madmen ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... carefully lay two or three pieces on the dying embers. The fire itself was to Marion a source of continual dread; for not only did it consume their precious and unrenewable supply of wood with a terrifying voracity, but she was fairly obsessed by the fear that she might let it go out. In that event they might never waken, clutched by the cold in their sleep; or wakening, find that something had happened to the matches. There remained a good store of these in the box enfolded carefully in a bit ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... which of the many families of Birds the analogy of structure and probable way of life would lead us to assimilate Rhamphorhynchus, the answer must point to the swimming races with long wings, clawed feet, hooked beak, and habits or violence and voracity; and for preference, the shortness of the legs, and other circumstances, may be held to claim for the Stonesfield fossil a more than fanciful similitude to the groups of Cormorants, and other marine divers, which constitute an effective part of the ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... "Robinson Crusoe," "The Pilgrim's Progress," a history of the United States, and Weem's "Life of Washington". These were the best, and these he read over and over till he knew them almost by heart. But his voracity for anything printed was insatiable. He would sit in the twilight and read a dictionary as long as he could see. He used to go to David Turnham's, the town constable, and devour the "Revised Statutes of Indiana," as boys in our day do the "Three Guardsmen." Of the ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... would seem to be from the E.N.E. Here, too, an occasional grass tree or "black-boy" may be seen, and at intervals little clumps of what is locally termed "mustard bush," so named from the strong flavour of the leaf; camels eat this with voracity, of which fact one becomes very sensible when ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... greatly prized. The place in which they killed these turtles was called the Galapagar. They fed them in a curious manner: at night there was thrown for them, into a large dry tank, the carcase of a cow or a calf; and such was the voracity of the amphibious animals, that, in the morning, nothing remained of ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... strays into her realm, no pity, no sympathy springing from the memory of her own offspring, moves her to kindness; but she goes at it with a demoniac fury, and would peck its little life out, if fear did not lend it wings. She has a self-abnegation great as that of human mothers. Her voracity and timidity disappear. She goes almost without food herself, that her chicks may eat. She scatters the dough about with her own bill, that it may be accessible to the little bills, or, perhaps, to teach them how to work. The wire-worms, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... enough left to cry. Your letter to A—— revived me, and just brought me enough to life again to eat my supper, which I had not felt able to touch, in spite of my exhaustion and great need of it; when, however, I once began, my appetite justified the French proverb and took the turn of voracity, and I devoured like a Homeric hero. I promised to tell you something of our late dinner at Lord Melbourne's, but have left myself neither space nor time. It was very pleasant, and I fell out of my love for our host (who, moreover, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... dictionaries under the word gourmandise, and am by no means satisfied with what I find. The love of good living seems to be constantly confounded with gluttony and voracity; whence I infer that our lexicographers, however otherwise estimable, are not to be classed with those good fellows amongst learned men who can put away gracefully a wing of partridge, and then, by raising the little finger, wash it down ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... occasionally reach a length of from twenty to twenty-five feet; as a matter of fact it seldom exceeds ten feet, but its great girth, and its solitary, nocturnal habit of haunting the mouths of shallow streams has invested it even to the native mind with fictional powers of voracity and destruction. Yet, despite the exaggerated accounts of the creature, it is really a dreadful monster, rendered the more dangerous to human life by the persistency with which it frequents muddied and shallow water, particularly after a freshet ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... his early walk, at Buddle's door. He had begun to grow more hopeful. But hearing this he walked home, and replaced the dress-coat and silk stockings he had ventured to remove, promptly in his valise, which he buckled down and locked—swallowed with agitated voracity some fragments of breakfast—got on his easy boots and gaiters—brushed his best hat, and locked it into its leather case—placed his rug, great-coat, and umbrella, and a rough walking-stick for service, and a gold-tipped, exquisite cane, for duty on promenades of fashion, neatly on top of his ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... picture of her personality, if you can call it a personality, Dickens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... one of looping channels with oval interstices, and the dentellated border of the commonwealth resembles that sort of lace which was made by arranging on glass the food of a silk-spinning worm: the creature ate and wove, having voracity always before him and Fine Art behind him. Much of the solider part of the State is made of the materials which enter into glass-manufacture: a mighty enchanter might fuse the greater portion of it into one gigantic goblet. A slight approximation to this work of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... which has been denied by some. I again added something. He now had his supper. I gave him a feed of mutton, and broth and bread. This was his feast before parting, for I did not like to send him away as a blackguard, notwithstanding he had extremely annoyed me. I never saw a person eat with such voracity. After his allowance, or the supper I had cooked him, a large supper was sent in by the Rais for three. He set to and ate his own and Said's share in the bargain. I have often seen Arabs gorge in this ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... situated in remote and dreary deserts, inhabited only by wild beasts and vermin, among which last there was, it seems, a species of ants, which were of enormous size, and wonderful fierceness and voracity, and which could run faster than the fleetest horse or camel. These ants, in making their excavations, would bring up from beneath the surface of the ground all the particles of gold which came in their way, and throw ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the fair face of their stepmother without crying aloud for fear; and how at last he discovered, to his horror and dismay, that he had wedded a fearful creature, half wolf, half woman, combining the seductions of the syren with the cruel voracity of the brute. There was something about Maud Bruce to remind one of that horrible myth, even now, now at her gentlest and softest, while she clung round a sorrowing father, by the death-bed of one, whom, in their different ways, both ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... feed the fern owl's young. Does any one think the cuckoo could herself feed two young cuckoos? How many birds would it take to feed three young cuckoos? Supposing there were five young cuckoos in the nest, would it not take almost all the birds in a hedge to feed them? For the incredible voracity of the young cuckoo—swallow, swallow, swallow, and gape, gape, gape—cannot be computed. The two robins or the pair of hedge-sparrows in whose nest the young cuckoo is bred, work the day through, and cannot satisfy him; and the mother cuckoo is ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... an extremely good appetite, but the voracity of the stranger soon obliged him to give up, for, not contented with eating, or rather devouring, nearly the whole of the olla-podriga, the guest finished a large loaf of bread, without leaving a crumb. While he ate, he kept continually looking round with an expression of inquietude: he started ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... of my stomach, and I ate sparingly in the knowledge that my natural voracity would surely kill me did I yield myself to it. Never had sweeter morsels passed my lips, and I make free to confess that I shed tears of joy, again and again, at contemplation of that ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... wasting their summer at Quincy for want of some one to hire their services at three dollars a day, such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay Gould, or his ame damnee Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and with as little fear of consequences. They risked something; no one could say what; but the people about the Erie office were not regarded ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the industrious little wren were all to be seen enlivening the fields with their presence and their songs; while the soaring fish-hawk was already hovering over the waters of the Otsego, watching with native voracity for the ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... The animal immediately, as if famished with hunger, fell upon the fruit, seized it between the thumbs and the index fingers, and took large mouthfuls out of it, opening the mouth to the fullest extent with extreme voracity. In the space of three hours the whole fruit was consumed. Next morning the Bat was killed, and found to weigh one ounce, half the weight of the food eaten in three hours! Indeed, the animal when eating seemed to be a kind ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... it is sure to be among the ripest and best flavored. When alarmed he seizes a capital one by striking his open bill into it, and bears it off to the woods." He eats the rich, succulent, milky young corn with voracity. He is of a gay and frolicsome disposition, and half a dozen of the fraternity are frequently seen diving and vociferating around the high dead limbs of some large trees, pursuing and playing with each other, and amusing the passerby with their gambols. ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... little by little before his voracity, and in contentment greater than virtue can give, he sank back ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... be a weakness of hers," he now observed. "I hope her voracity is satisfied. I should say that it resembles the voracity of ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... make him gentle and tractable. But the gods one and all shrank in dismay when they saw the wolf, and none dared approach to give him food except Tyr, whom nothing daunted. Seeing that Fenris daily increased in size, strength, voracity, and fierceness, the gods assembled in council to deliberate how they might best dispose of him. They unanimously decided that as it would desecrate their peace-steads to slay him, they would bind him fast so that he could work them ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... hydrogen increases in the same ratio; and by gratifying the appetite thus excited, we obtain the most efficient protection against the most piercing cold. A starving man is soon frozen to death. The animals of prey in the arctic regions, as every one knows, far exceed in voracity those of ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... world of admiring or envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons—the persons must be and they must smile—a rudimentary truth which is surely forgotten by those who complain of mankind as generally contemptible, since any other aspect of the race must disappoint the voracity of their contempt. Grandcourt, in town for the first time with his wife, had his non-caring abstinence from curses enlarged and diversified by splendid receptions, by conspicuous rides and drives, by presentations ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... from me to the viand, in a way to render it a little doubtful whether I was a welcome visitor. But that honest old principle of seamen which never refuses to share equally with an ancient mess-mate, got the better even of his voracity. ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in such unattractive guise he had come upon Violet, and the fashion in which he ate also had its effect on her. In the last thirty hours he had had only one hasty meal, and he showed a voracity that offended her fastidious taste. He was worn out and anxious, and since all his thoughts were fixed upon the business that he had in hand, he could not rouse himself to act according to the manner expected of a lover who returns after a long absence. It was, however, once more ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... way to win him. The only difference between men and women in this respect is, that most women are vain, and some men are not. There are some men who have no self-love; but if they have, female vanity is but a trifling and airy passion compared with the vast voracity of appetite which in the sterner sex can swallow anything, and always crave ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... at the age of eighty, was celebrated for his great knowledge of books. He has been called the Helluo, or the Glutton of Literature, as Peter Comestor received his nickname from his amazing voracity for food he could never digest; which appeared when having fallen sick of so much false learning, he threw it all up in his "Sea of Histories," which proved to be the history of all things, and a bad history of everything. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... it interfered greatly with the stringent aptitudes of her character and the warmest passion of her heart; it took away from her the delicious power of serving out the servants' food, of locking up the scraps of meat, and of charging the maids with voracity. But, to tell the truth, Mr. Mason had been driven by sheer necessity to take this step, as it had been found impossible to induce his wife to give out sufficient food to enable the servants to live and work. She knew that in not doing so she injured herself; ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... way towards our vessel, which was at that time more than two hundred miles from land. Exhausted, it clung on to the fore-yard arm; and a present of a rupee induced a Lascar to go aloft and seize it, which he did after several attempts. The voracity with which it attacked some plantains showed that it had been for some time deprived of food, probably having been blown off shore by high winds. Hanging head-downwards from its cage, it stuffed the fruit into its cheeks, monkey-fashion, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... tumbles out a whole library of reading: but only in Ethics, does he indicate a leading or preferential work; the half-dozen of classical books on the subject are to be perused, "under the determinate sentence" of the scripture authorities. With all this voracity for the useful, Milton had no conception of scientific form, or method; and indeed, few of the subjects had as yet passed the stage of desultory treatment; so that the idea of casting the knowledge into some one form, under the guidance of a chosen author, would never ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... various dictionaries for the word gourmandise and have found no translation that suited me. It is described as a sort of confusion of gluttony and voracity. Whence I have concluded that lexicographers, though very pleasant people in other respects, are not the sort of men to swallow a partridge wing gracefully with one hand, with a glass of Laffitte or clos de Vougeot ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... floor was thickly covered with mud and dirt, in the midst of which, near the fire, was seated an old Indian with a pan of boiled corn on his lap, which he was scooping up with both hands and devouring with the utmost voracity. ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... driving them on the ice, where they slipped and fell, and were easily dispatched. The hunters loaded themselves with beef for present and future supply, and then returned and encamped at the last nights's fire. Here they passed the remainder of the day, cooking and eating with a voracity proportioned to previous starvation, forgetting in the hearty revel of the moment the certain dangers with ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... himself.—Authentic and rather well kept cookbooks inform us about the cost of the cult: We can more or less estimate how much the sacred crocodiles consumed in ten years; we know their bills of daily fare, their favorite morsels. Naturally, the god selected the fattest victims, but his voracity was so great that he likewise bolted down, and blindly, the lean ones, and in much greater number than the fattest. Moreover, by virtue of his instincts, and an unfailing effect of the situation, he ate his equals once or twice a year, except when they succeeded ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... but it was not the flies' fault that their parents were prolific, and that they had been hatched in a climate eminently conducive to their vigour and happiness. Their numbers and their voracity showed that they, too, were compelled by the struggle for life to be active and enterprising. Unlike some beings of a higher order, they did not take this trouble sadly; but, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Esquimaux meal may well astonish us. While wintering at Boothia Land, Sir John Ross was always surprised at the voracity of his guides; he says somewhere that two men—two, you understand—ate in one morning a whole quarter of a musk-ox; they tear the meat into long shreds, which they place in their mouths; then each one, cutting off at his lips what his mouth cannot hold, passes ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... separation in no way changed the prisoner's almost disease of voracity. Nor was he, in other respects, obviously altered. He did not speak of Heartall to any of his comrades. He walked alone in the airing-ground, in the hours of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... large quantities. It was sufficient to put a line over the rocks, and it had hardly time to go down a fathom before anything at the end of it was seized. Indeed, our means of taking them were as simple as their voracity was great. Our lines were composed of the sinews of the legs of the man-of-war birds, as I afterwards heard them named; and, as these were only about a foot long, it required a great many of them knotted together to ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... large cubs, being attracted by the scent of some blubber, proceeding from a seahorse, which had been set on fire, and was burning on the ice, ran eagerly towards it, dragged some pieces out of the flames, and eat them with great voracity. The sailors threw them some lumps still left in their possession, which the old bear took away and laid before her cubs, reserving only a small piece for herself. As they were eating the last piece, the men shot the cubs, and wounded the ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... skimmed along the surface of the stream, pounced on the floating body. They were urubus, a kind of small vulture, with naked necks and long claws, and black as crows. In South America they are known as gallinazos, and their voracity is unparalleled. The body, torn open by their beaks, gave forth the gases which inflated it, its density increased, it sank down little by little, and for the last time what remained of Torres disappeared beneath the waters ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... but savoury meal, and wonderfully picturesque too, for the fire burned up briskly, shedding a bright light upon their hosts in their rough goatskin clothes, as they sat looking on as if pleased and amused at Punch's voracity, while now the herd of goats that had scampered away into the darkness recovered from their panic and came slowly back one by one, to form a circle round the fire, where they stood, long-horned, shaggy, and full-bearded, looking in the half-light like ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... throwing the line, with its hook baited with cod liver, these birds made for it with a rush, and in such numbers that you could not draw it out in order to throw it again, without capturing them by the beak, feet, and wings as they slew and fell upon the bait, so great were the eagerness and voracity of these birds. This fishing afforded us great pleasure, not only on account of the sport, but on account of the infinite number of birds and fish that we captured, which were very good eating, and made a very desirable ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... given of the animals indigenous in Lower Mesopotainia, that there was abundant room for the display of a sportsman's skill and daring when men first settled in that region. The Senkareh tablets show the boldness and voracity of the Chaldaean lion, which not only levied contributions on the settlers' cattle, but occasionally ventured to attack man himself. We have not as yet any hunting scenes belonging to these early times; but ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... boys sat in their tennis flannels beneath the glare of lamp and gas. Their leather belts were loosened, their soft pink shirts unbuttoned at the collar. They were listening with gloomy voracity to the instruction of a third. They sat at a table bared of its customary sporting ornaments, and from time to time they questioned, sucked their pencils, and scrawled vigorous, laconic notes. Their necks and faces shone with the bloom of out-of-doors. Studious concentration ...
— Philosophy 4 - A Story of Harvard University • Owen Wister
... without a defect would be to outrage nature, and to render imitation hopeless. Horner, it must be admitted, with all his excellence, was too fond of good eating; it is in vain to deny it; his deliberately pulling out a plum with his finger and thumb, shows the epicure, not excited by the voracity of hunger, but evidently aiming to protract his enjoyment. The exclamation which follows savours of vanity; but when his youth is recollected, this will be deemed a venial error, and it must also be considered that his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... the chamber itself, but the anterooms and staircase were hung from cornice to skirting with black. The undertaker's men were ever in the house: they ate and drank whole mountains of beef and bread, whole seas of ale and punch (thus to qualify their voracity) in the servants' hall. They say my Grandmother's funeral cost a thousand pounds, which Cadwallader and Mrs. Talmash would really have grudged, but that it was the will of the executors, who were persons of condition, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... great curiosity and attention, and received very thankfully such little presents as we made them; neither of them, however, could be persuaded either to eat or drink, but their servants devoured every thing they could get with great voracity. We found that these men had heard of our kindness and liberality to the natives who had been on board before, yet we thought the confidence they placed in us an extraordinary instance of their fortitude. At night I brought-to till day-light, and then made sail; at seven in the morning, I ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... a soldier with his saber; in another, finally, a horse with its rider. In candor, none of these sounds like divinely inspired truth. But the fact remains that not a single dogfish let itself get caught in the Nautilus's nets, so I can't vouch for their voracity. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... tranquillity vanished, and the voracity with which he devoured the unaccustomed dainty showed that though he might have no demon thoughts to rack his brain, the vulture in his ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... only man, considered separately from all which is characteristic of him, seems capable of multiplying indefinitely, because his intelligence and his resources secure him from seeing his increase arrested by the voracity of any animals. He exercises over them such a supremacy that, instead of fearing the larger and stronger races of animals, he is thus rather capable of destroying them, and he continually checks ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... have lately contained accounts of a halibut which swallowed a cormorant and survived the exploit only to fall a victim to the wiles of a North Sea fisherman. As the cormorant is generally regarded to be the dernier cri in voracity, the incident illustrates the old saying of the biter bit. As a rule birds of prey have the upper hand in their contests with the finny denizens of the deep. But the triumph of the halibut is not altogether ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... the cake greedily from the man's hands, and ate it with such voracity that the doctors who were present did not fail to say that this haste was not a good sign. Indeed, the Prince came near to being choked by the ring, which he nearly swallowed, in one of the pieces of cake. But he drew it cleverly from his mouth, and his ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... to understand that the voracity of the growing animal will be satisfied with less than ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the fierce heat of which some of their slices of steaks were held a few minutes then given to the famished woman. Eagerly seizing them she held one to the mouth of the child, when it seized it and commenced sucking the juicy food with great voracity, while the rest disappeared with a rapidity that astonished even the chief, who was so rarely astonished ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a shivering little hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid, and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein. A curious contrast to her Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper. At another table there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... responded to her tone by a smile, which but half lit up his face. It was followed by a coarser expression, and he ate his food with fierce voracity and asked ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Our guides being encamped by themselves, I was curious to ascertain by ocular evidence the manner in which the first kettle would be disposed of, nor did I wait long till my curiosity was gratified. The cannibals fell upon the half-cooked flesh with a voracity which I could not have believed even savages capable of; and in an incredibly short space of time the kettle was disposed of;—and this, too, after their usual daily allowance, which is equal to, and sometimes exceeds, that of the other men, who say they have enough. ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... clasped and wrung her hands, while an ashen hue came over her distorted features. Good heavens—Beauchene! Yes, it was Beauchene whom he resembled, and in so striking a manner, with his eyes of prey, his big jaw which proclaimed an enjoyer consumed by base voracity, that she was now astonished that she had not been able to name him at her first glance. Her legs failed her, and she ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... rationalism, and the ponderous hot irons of empirics, it is undeniably true that the habit of 'seeking after a sign' survived the generation of Scribes and Pharisees whom Christ rebuked; and manifests itself in the middle of the nineteenth century by the voracity with which merely material phenomena are seized as unmistakable indications of preternatural agencies. The innate leaven of superstition triumphs over common sense and scientific realism, and men and women are awed by coincidences that ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... resources. Fourteen ducks, a leg, a wing, and a bit of the breast, entombed, within twenty-four hours, in the stomach of each of these seven men! The very feathers in their pillows (had they had any) would have cried out against such voracity. Truly it is without a spark of compassion that we read of their reduction, precisely one week afterwards, to short and less palatable commons. "Oct. 26. We enjoyed most gratefully our two wallabies, which were stewed, and to which I had added some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... speed upon the prairie, in a straight line. We turned our horses, and resumed our march; and when we had advanced a mile or more, we looked back, and again saw the ill-fated animal surrounded by his tormentors, to whose insatiable voracity he ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... Review' by Jeffrey, in Jan. 1807. It was probably the following passage which provoked Byron's note: "When every day is bringing forth some new work from the pen of Scott, Campbell,... Wordsworth, and Southey, it is natural to feel some disgust at the undistinguishing voracity which can swallow down these... verses to a pillow." The 'Wanderer of Switzerland', which Byron said he preferred to the 'Lyrical Ballads', was published in 1806. The allusion in line 419 is to the first stanza of ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... walls. They lived in a way completely patriarchal; dwelling in isolated cabins, and with habits of the utmost frugality. We read in one of their old histories that a whole convent of Benedictines was terrified at the voracity of a German sculptor who was repairing their chapel. They implored him to look elsewhere for his food; for that he and his sons consumed enough to exhaust the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... catarrh'. It exhibited the ordinary symptoms of coryza: it was a catarrhal affection in its early stage; but it afterwards degenerated into a species of palsy. The causes were unknown. By some, they were attributed to the natural voracity of the dog; by others, to his occasional lasciviousness; by others, to his frequent feeding on carrion, or the refuse of ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... visiting museums and manufactories, holding intercourse with learned men, and making considerable proficiency in civil engineering and the science of fortification. Nothing escaped his eager inquiries. "Wat is dat?" was his perpetual exclamation. "He devoured every morsel of knowledge with unexampled voracity." Never was seen a man on this earth with a more devouring appetite for knowledge of every kind; storing up in his mind everything he saw, with a view of introducing improvements into Russia. To see this barbaric emperor thus going to school, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... importance and in numbers were the white ants, whose powers of destructiveness were simply awful. Mats, cloth, portmanteaus, clothes, in short, every article I possessed, seemed on the verge of destruction, and, as I witnessed their voracity, I felt anxious lest my tent should be devoured while I slept. This was the first khambi since leaving the coast where their presence became a matter of anxiety; at all other camping places hitherto the red and black ants had usurped our attention, but at Mpwapwa the red species ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... formed no close associations, and I even contrived to avoid, as I had afterwards occasion to regret, such lessons as were distasteful to me, and therefore particularly valuable. But I read with unchecked voracity, and in several curious directions. Shakespeare now passed into my possession entire, in the shape of a reprint more hideous and more offensive to the eyesight than would in these days appear conceivable. I ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... a young wolf was put to school, to endeavour, by instruction, to correct his natural propensity to voracity. His master, in order to teach him to read, transcribed, in large characters, some letters of the alphabet, and attempted to make him understand these signs. But instead of reading K L S, as it was written, the savage animal ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the women to sit down on the ground in the shade and not move under penalty of "gettin' a wing clipped." We obeyed in silence and looked on while the pirates with wolfish voracity devoured the meal which had been meant for us. They had pocket-flasks with them, and as they attacked them with frequency the talk grew louder and wilder. By degrees it was possible to comprehend the extraordinary disaster which ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... scrapings of wood have plenty of time for travelling, while the minute nutritive particles they contain are being thoroughly disengaged; and as every part of the animal organization tends towards keeping our insatiable rodents in the constant state of voracity required by its inexorable pulps, nature has given it an enormous heart whose size exceeds even that ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... persuaded himself that the American woman would be as bestial and stupid as a wrestler at a county fair, and instead her stupidity was of an altogether feminine nature. Certainly, she lacked education and tact, had neither good sense nor wit, and displayed an animal voracity at table, but she possessed all the childish traits of a woman. Her manner and speech were coquettish and affected, those of a silly, scandal-loving young girl. There was absolutely ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... flesh, and fowl, soups and syrups, fruits, fricassees, roast and boiled, pickles and preserves. As a most generous supply had been provided, there were still some remnants of the feast left after the guests had satisfied their voracity, which most of these Japanese, in accordance with their custom, stowed away about their persons to carry off. The Japanese always have an abundant supply of paper within the left bosom of their loose robes, in a capacious pocket. This is used for various ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... make only two meals in the day, one in the morning and another at sunset; but their voracity when they do eat is often very great. Nicholas remarks that the chiefs and their followers, with whom he made the voyage from Port Jackson, used, while in the ship, to seize upon every thing they could lay their hands upon ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... and great confusion ensued, as each one of the marshal's army who recognized a friend rushed out of the ranks and hastened to him, offering food and clothing, and were almost frightened by the voracity with which they ate, while many embraced each other silently in tears. One of the marshal's best and bravest officers stripped off his uniform to give it to a poor soldier whose tattered clothing exposed him almost naked to the cold, donning himself an old cloak full of holes, saying that ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... they said, and there can be no doubt that it was most imprudent of us to embark in a little frail canoe, and to make a trip over a lake inhabited by such numbers of caymans, and especially since it was to be feared that the lake did not supply fish enough to satisfy their voracity; and of course when enraged by hunger they were more ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... they seek to make interest with the Pincian bonnes, whom they readily conciliate by withdrawing the attention of the children from any collateral object of interest which may engage theirs. Petted and patted by many little hands, which bongre malgre must give up their buns to his voracity, the large quadruped, in return for these snatched courtesies, follows the small urchin, who is learning to trundle his hoop, barking for it to proceed, and stopping when it stops. Any one observing their clever gambols and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various |
