"Voracity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... capture of others was attempted, but in vain, and in the chase one of the Spaniards was wounded by a poisoned arrow, which caused his death almost instantaneously. Intrepid hunters, these people wander about perpetually in pursuit of guanaquis and other game; they are endowed with such wonderful voracity "that what would suffice for the nourishment of twenty sailors, can scarcely satisfy seven or eight of them." Magellan, foreseeing that the stay here was likely to be prolonged, and perceiving that the country only presented meagre resources, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... appetite, craving at one time their accustomed sustenance in one vast aggregate of hunger. It is like having to undertake the feeding of the entire population of London. The mouth of Gargantua is but a faint type of even one day's voracity; and all this is devoured in a spot which hardly twenty years ago was unmarked upon the map, a mere streak of pasture-land on the banks of the Grand Junction canal. Surely this is not one of the least astonishing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... 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 whole stock of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... 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 ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... skim sky-blue milk-and-water, and a couple of slices of bread-and-butter for each pupil, comprised the bill of fare; but it might have been a banquet of Lucullus from the way I did justice to it after my prolonged fast. Noticing my voracity, the old woman, who, as on the evening before, acted as mistress of the ceremonies, gave me an extra allowance of porridge, which made me her friend thenceforth—at least at ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... White House or the Treasury, since none other could have satisfied him. To young men 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
... this abrupt transition, the scout had instant recourse to the fragments of food which had escaped the voracity of the Hurons. A very summary process completed the simple cookery, when he and the Mohicans commenced their humble meal, with the silence and characteristic diligence of men who ate in order to enable themselves to endure great and ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... appetite:—He gave it "a ripe banana, which, with the skin removed, weighed exactly two ounces. 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
... the fowls' voracity made her laugh. She calmly related other cruelties of theirs: young chickens devoured, of which she had only found the necks and wings, and a litter of kittens eaten up in the stable in a ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... throb in response to his, a new world opened to them—a world more human—that conquered them by its cries for pity, and of eternal misery, which henceforth they were to hear rising from all things. Besides, they were not difficult to please; they showed the voracity of youth, a furious appetite for all kinds of literature, good and bad alike. So eager were they to admire something, that often the most execrable works threw them into a state of exaltation similar to that which ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... beside her, where the food, consisting of meat and a few simple vegetables, was spread upon a rude table which had no legs. Quanonshet and Madokawandock were not behind-hand in their movements, and the whole four fell to with such voracity, that, in a very short time, their hunger ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... 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 ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson |
