"Snaky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hot," to be sure; a golden-coloured haze seemed to float over the whole land like the subdued reflection of a bright flame. It made one feel uncomfortable to look upon the glowing landscape: the long snaky river gave no idea of coolness; it had a dead shiny look, only to be likened to a ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... nodded when at length Weston carefully clamped down a big copper cap on a length of snaky fuse and inserted it ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... out-house or lumber-room which had been selected by Baldwin for the stowing away of his diving apparatus and stores while these were not in use at the new pier which was in process of erection in the neighbouring harbour. Its floor was littered with snaky coils of india-rubber tubing; enormous boots with leaden soles upwards of an inch thick; several diving helmets, two of which were of brightly polished metal, while the others were more or less battered, ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... Pimlico, after another delay, Tomkins was produced. Again Brett described David Hume, adorned now with "black, snaky eyes ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... scene, unfolding the tragic tale. The ill-fated Duncan was slain; the Witches of Endor capered fearsomely about their fearsome cauldron of snaky, froggy horrors; and then—taking some liberties with the theme as set down by the original author—the operator presented a picture wherein Macbeth, tortured by sleeplessness and hag-ridden with remorse, saw, in imagination, the dripping blood upon his ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... frowned. l. 218. The Egyptian Medusa is represented on antient gems with wings on her head, snaky hair, and a beautiful countenance, which appears intensely thinking; and was supposed to represent divine wisdom. The Grecian Medusa, on Minerva's shield, as appears on other gems, has a countenance distorted ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... are more concerned. Probably each of us has his mental picture that passes as a symbol rather than an idea of the different continents. This is usually a single picture-a deep river, with forest, hanging snaky vines, anacondas and monkeys for the east coast of South America, for example. It is built up in youth by chance reading and chance pictures, and does as well as a pink place on the map to stand for a part of the world concerning which we know nothing at all. As time goes on we extend, expand, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... desires. What a horrible thing! Who made it to be like that, a bestial part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust. O why was ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... old frazzled-out rope all hammered in tight, the other man came and brought him something that looked all snaky, and it was shiny like the lead of a pencil, and it waved about as if it were heavy and it seemed to be all moist ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... Madhu, the excellent ornament of Arjuna's head, celebrated throughout the earth, the welkin, heaven, and the waters, the Suta's son swept off from the crown of his rival, with that arrow, in consequence of the very nature of that snaky weapon and the great care and wrath with which it had been shot. That diadem, endued with the splendour of the sun or the moon or fire or a planet, and adorned with gold and pearls and gems and diamonds, had with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... undulated along the pavement in a curved line. It may be too fanciful to say that something, either in his moral or material aspect, suggested the idea that a miracle had been wrought by transforming a serpent into a man, but so imperfectly that the snaky nature was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere outward guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that his complexion had a greenish tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a species of marble out of which he had ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the guides and the hotel clerks and porters but even the simple gondolier has a secret understanding with all branches of the retail trade. You get into a long, snaky, black gondola and fee the beggar who pushes you off, and all the other beggars who have assisted in the pushing off or have merely contributed to the success of the operation by being present, and you tell your gondolier in your best Italian or your worst pidgin English where ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... boys, she was as withered and wrinkled and brown as an old frosted punkin-vine; and her little snaky eyes sparkled and snapped, and it made yer head kind o' dizzy to look at 'em; and folks used to say that anybody that Ketury got mad at was sure to get the worst of it fust or last. And so, no matter what day or hour Ketury had a mind to rap at anybody's door, ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the world below the earth, to which all we mortals must one day come, grant me to tell a simple tale and declare unto you the truth. Not to look upon the blackness of Tartarus have I come hither, nor yet to bind in chains the snaky heads on Cerberus. It is my wife I seek. A viper's sting has robbed her of the years that were her due. I should have borne my loss, indeed I tried to bear it, but I was overcome by Love, a god well known in the world above, and I think not without honor ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... kembutsu. So, likewise, are any situations from which beautiful scenery may be looked at, or any localities where one can enjoy such charming spectacles as the blossoming of cherry-trees in spring, the flickering of fireflies in summer nights, the flushing of maple-leaves in autumn, or even that long snaky motion of moonlight upon water to which Chinese poets have given the delightful name of Kinryo, 'the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... too spooky and snaky to live in, and the boys made their camp in the open, near a tamarind tree and, as they observed later, beside an overgrown grave. An old barrel under the eaves of the house was nearly full of rain water, which they were likely ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... then tearing it in long strips she cross tore them and sifted the handful of small bits on the water, where they started a dashing journey toward the river. Mrs. Holt, narrowly watching her, turned with snaky gleaming eyes to her son and whispered: "A-ha! Miss Smart ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... where it did strike through the sunlit spots were dazzling in contrast with the somber shadow of the forest. The undergrowth grew denser, so that he climbed with greater toil through the maze of thorned bush and snaky creepers that twined in enormous lengths ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... now only a question of sturdy fighting and squirming one's way through the meshes of a gigantic basketwork of every variety of fantastic branch and stem and stout strangling thorn-set vine, made the denser with snaky roots—not merely twisting about one's feet, but dropping from the boughs in nooses and festoons for one's neck; air-plants too, like birds' nests, further choking up the meshes, and hanging moss, like rotting carpets, adding still more to the murk and curious squalor ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... possibility had been demonstrated. The very next year (1851) Mr T.R. Crampton, with Messrs. Wollaston, Kuper, and others, made and laid an improved cable between Dover and Calais, and ere long many other parts of the world were connected by means of snaky submarine electric cables. ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate's squire. Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black .. negro-savage, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... alone they said, Beating and dinning at my head. I could not fly. I could not shun it. Slimily twisting, slow and blind, It crept and crept into my mind. Whispered and shouted, sneered and laughed, Screamed out until my brain was daft.... One snaky word, "WHAT IF ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... delivered by Mrs. Lebours, who meanwhile flourished the reward-book; Miss Rader approached Adele, and tapping her unkindly on the shoulder, she whispered to her in a whistling tone, her snaky eyes expressing the kindliness of a tiger: "You see what you gain through wanting to leave my school; you lose a ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... must know first if Mr. Engelman has really set his heart on the woman with the snaky movements and the sleepy eyes. Can you certify ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... ago, when some invisible force impelled me to look aside. From between the broad and hunching shoulders of Chartersea I met such a venomous stare as a cattle-fish might use to freeze his prey. Cattle—fish! The word kept running over my tongue. I thought of the snaky arms that had already caught Mr. Marmaduke, and were soon, perhaps, to entangle Dorothy. She had begged me not to ride, and I was risking a life which might ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... stage, five feet back from the footlights, ran a snaky-looking fence with high-spiked posts. It had taken him all morning to build it, even with Alec's and Walker's help. Above this peered a thicket of small trees and underbrush bearing a marvellous crop of gold ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... was an uncanny place to be in. She could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin, and more terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm. She remembered the tales they told of the big log overhead and she was afraid of those snaky things on the windowsills. She remembered the man who had been killed in the draw, and she wondered what she would do if she saw crazy Lou's white face glaring into the window. The rattling of the door became ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... The ground here was different from the ground they had traversed in coming to the fort. This was boggy; here and there the foot sank with a sough into the pulp of morass and rotten leaves; the lianas were thinner and more snaky, the greenery, if possible, greener, and the air close and moist as the air ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... appeared, And with soft words his drooping spirits cheered; His hat adorned with wings disclosed the god, And in his hand he bore the sleep-compelling rod; Such as he seemed, when, at his sire's command, On Argus' head he laid the snaky wand. "Arise," he said, "to conquering Athens go; There Fate appoints an end of all thy woe." The fright awakened Arcite with a start, Against his bosom bounced his heaving heart; But soon he said, with scarce recovered breath, "And thither will I go to ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... lands, lugging through the air, horses, giraffes, elephants, and rhinoceroses, and dropping them at the door of the ark. One has crossed the Atlantic with rattlesnakes, copperheads, and boas twined around him, almost crippling his wings with their snaky folds; and another with a brace of skunks, one under each wing, that the renewed world may not lack the fragrance of the old. What a subject for the pencil of a Raphael or Dore! Had the "hardened spectators" beheld such a scene as this, Noah ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on the opposite side of ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... at all. This evening, till a strong breeze blew them away, they were intolerable. Aunt Judy goes about in a dignified silence, too full for words, only asking two or three times, "W'at I dun tole you fum de fust?" The food is a trial. This evening the snaky candles lighted the glass and silver on the supper-table with a pale gleam and disclosed a frugal supper indeed—tea without milk (for all the cows are gone), honey, and bread. A faint ray twinkled on the water swishing against the house and stretching away into the dark ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... I'd not play harps, but horns When I chased the unicorns— Magic tubes with pistons greasy, Slides that pushed and pulled out easy, Cylinders of snaky brass Where the fingers like to fuss, Polished like a looking-glass, Ending in ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... on the stage existed (says an old writer) about the beginning of the eighteenth century. A dance of infernals having to be exhibited, they were represented in dresses of black and red, with fiery eyes and snaky locks, and garnished with every pendage of horror. They were twelve in number. In the middle of their performance, while intent upon the figure in which they had been completely practised, an actor of some humour, who had been accommodated with a spare ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... changed front with the speed of light and attacked with horse, foot and guns. She failed to see, she had declared, where this poor, lone girt was in great fault. Of course it was probable that she had listened to this snaky. tongued Rufus Coleman, but that was ever the mistake that women made. Oh, certainly ; the professor would like to let Rufus Coleman off scot-free. That was the way with men. They defended each other in all ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... with papa, then one with Aunt Marion, last with Almighty God, and afterward, horribile dictu, pitchforks for little Margaret, and a vivid incandescent state to be maintained through eternity at vast cost of pit-coal to a gentleman who carried over his arm, so as not to step on it, a long snaky tail with ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... not slip away. From another compartment she took a smaller one, which began to wriggle both with head and tail, as she held it about the middle in her closed fist. This made her laugh. She let it go, then seized another and another, scouring the basin and stirring up the whole heap of snaky-looking ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... maid-servants, when I hears the Egyptian say, 'It's gwine beautiful.' 'How?' says t'other. 'He'll nibble like hanything,' was the answer, and then I hearn a nasty sort o' laugh. Soon after, I see you with a bootiful young lady, and I see that hinfidel a-watchin' yer, with a snaky look in his eyes. And so I kep on watchin', and scuse me, yer honour, but I can guess as 'ow things be, and I'm fear'd as 'ow this waccination dodge is a ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... warriors seat themselves, weapons concealed under blankets; but when Pontiac raises the wampum belt that was to be the signal for the massacre to begin, Major Gladwin, never moving his light blue eyes from {283} the snaky gleam of the Indian, waves his hand, and at the motion there is a roll of drums, a grounding of the sentry's arms, a trampling of soldiers outside, a rush as of white men marching. Pontiac is dumfounded and departs without giving the signal. Back ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... suspicion, when to the measured beatings of the tom-tom, gradually becoming faster, and with a low, weird, tuneless chant, like the voices of the forest, the Indians began to tread a mazy, winding pace, which my slow eyes could not follow, but which in a strange way brought up memories of snaky convolutions about the naked body of some Egyptian serpent-charmer. The drums beat faster. The suppressed voices were breaking in shrill, wild, exultant strains, and the measured tread had quickened ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... it is Hate, that shapeless fiendly thing Of many names, all evil, some divine, 3380 Whom self-contempt arms with a mortal sting; Which, when the heart its snaky folds entwine Is wasted quite, and when it doth repine To gorge such bitter prey, on all beside It turns with ninefold rage, as with its twine 3385 When Amphisbaena some fair bird has tied, Soon o'er the putrid mass he threats on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... search'd, have livers white as milk; And these assume but valour's excrement To render them redoubted! Look on beauty And you shall see 'tis purchas'd by the weight: Which therein works a miracle in nature, Making them lightest that wear most of it: So are those crisped snaky golden locks Which make such wanton gambols with the wind, Upon supposed fairness, often known To be the dowry of a second head, The skull that bred them, in the sepulchre. Thus ornament is but the guiled shore To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian ...
— The Merchant of Venice • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... sisters who were gray-haired from their birth, whence their name. The Gorgons were monstrous females with huge teeth like those of swine, brazen claws, and snaky hair. None of these beings make much figure in mythology except Medusa, the Gorgon, whose story we shall next advert to. We mention them chiefly to introduce an ingenious theory of some modern writers, namely, that the Gorgons ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places with mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse had fallen into the water. On every stranded log the huge snapping turtles lie on sunny days in groups of four and six, baking their shells black in the sun, with their little snaky heads raised watchfully, ready to slip noiselessly off at the first sound of oars ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... But there was something else of ominous portent noticable. Simultaneously, northwest, east and southeast of our line three huge German captive balloons reared their heads for all the world like golden hooded cobras. Away, twenty miles to the south, in the sky could be seen the snaky outline of a zeppelin. The Germans were taking observations. When I reached the headquarters' line of trenches in front of our brigade headquarters, a few hundred yards west of St. Julien, I sent the horses back with Smith, my groom, and ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... sunshine and a sky. There would have been hours as long, when existence passed like a shade among shadows, in the multitudinous tappings of rain that dripped from leaf to leaf in the wood, and slipped so to the ground. He would have known little snaky paths, narrow enough to be filled by his own small feet, or a goat's; and he would have wondered where they went, and have marvelled again to find that, wherever they went, they came at last, through loops and twists of the branchy wood, to his own door. He may have ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... Dinkey, and seconded her enthusiastically. Without near the originality of Dinkey, she was yet a very good and sure pack-horse. The deceiving part about Jenny was her eye. It was baleful with the spirit of evil,—snaky and black, and with green sideways gleams in it. Catching the flash of it, you would forever after avoid getting in range of her heels or teeth. But it was all a delusion. Jenny's disposition was mild ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the cry of myriad cranes; Its voice, the bolts that whistle through the air; Its dance, that bow whose arrows are the rains. It staggers at the winds, and seems to smoke With clouds, which form its black and snaky cloak. 27 ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... snaky purpose, coiled behind those graceful, ambiguous forms of speech! Not new the tale to the man who sat and heard. She admired the black-haired, powerful head, and the square, pale face with its short, aquiline, rather heavily-modelled features, and the broad, white forehead that the single smudge ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves |
