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More "Voracity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before us through the summer. Yet we rather avoided this side, because we here could not satisfy our dainty appetites; and we turned to the side opposite, where an interminable row of currant and gooseberry bushes furnished our voracity with a succession of harvests till autumn. Not less important to us was an old, high, wide-spreading mulberry-tree, both on account of its fruits, and because we were told that the silk-worms fed upon its leaves. In this peaceful region my grandfather was found every evening, tending with ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the tin, brought out a hunch of bread and a knob of cheese. The voracity with which he fell on them, soon, with him also, stopped up the channels of speech. Louie, alarmed perhaps by the rapidity with which the mouthfuls disappeared, slid up on her heels and claimed ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... guttural ugh! and slapping his stomach he walked away, but returned in a few moments with a huge chunk of half cooked buffalo meat which he threw down before me, and unbinding my hands motioned me to eat. I did not need a second invitation, but fell to at once, and devoured it with such voracity, that my Indian friend seemed both astonished and amused. When I had finished he brought me water in a gourd, and again securing my hands, bound me fast to the tree and left ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... 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
... his reach, and slakes his thirst at the first mountain brook. Sometimes, 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 total stranger to lingering complaints, and to that numerous ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... When his servant re-entered with the wine and viands, Maltravers followed him out of the room, and bade him see the note sent immediately. On returning, he found Cesarini devouring the food before him with all the voracity of famine. It was a dreadful sight!—the intellect ruined, the mind darkened, the wild, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so called, because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... believe that my performance in the matter of eating it was not at all a success. It is true that stifling atmosphere, in tense heat, and many varieties of nastiness and nudity are not promoters of appetite; but even had I been given a clearer stage and more favourable conducers towards voracity, I must still have proved but a mere nibbler of sturgeon in the eyes of ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... 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 ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... incoherent. She was tearing open her own envelope. With a well-satisfied smile, the bearer of these communications seized a sandwich in one hand and poured himself out some tea with the other. He ate and drank with the restraint of good-breeding, but with a voracity which gave point to his plea of starvation. A few yards away, the breathless silence between the two women had given place to an almost ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 to ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... of the army filed before them; 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, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... and dismay a stout soldier, one of the crab-apple faction, who had possessed sufficient command over himself, in spite of the seeming voracity of his appetite, not to indulge to a dangerous excess, made his way one morning into the old Hall of Audience, and there, groping about, succeeded in finding the golden head of the Statue; which placing on the hilt of ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... 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 they chew ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... And Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and under of the selfsame substance; convertible personages: turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack; there is in him the due prurient insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 few faults were probably compensated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... 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 ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... 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
... consequences of his own words, but yielding to the inexorable fatality of his situation, "sometimes madness takes a stupid and brutal form; the unfortunate creature, who is attacked by it, preserves nothing human but the shape—has only the instincts of the lower animals—eats with voracity, and moves ever backwards and forwards in the cell, in which such a being is obliged to be confined. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the waters a laden vessell of great quantitie, with all the wares therein contained." The engraving shows one of them upsetting a three-masted Jacobean ship and swallowing sailors, apparently with great relish and voracity.[79] ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... 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 of living mill"—so ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... another coop 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... under way now. Mrs. Bence brought the last of the hot bread, and shuffled into a seat. The old man at the head of the board returned to his feeding, but with somewhat moderated voracity. At length, pretty fully gorged, he raised his head from over his plate and looked about him for diversion. Again his attention was directed to the ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... 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 read fluently Kid, Lamb, Sheep. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... disgusting, 'leeches,' which swarm in the grass, and upon the leaves of the jungle. These creatures insinuate themselves through all the openings in a person's dress—up the trousers, under the waistcoat, down the neck, up the wrists, and in fact everywhere, drawing blood with insatiable voracity, and leaving an unpleasant ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... 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 ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... to be a weakness of hers," he now observed. "I hope her voracity is satisfied. I should say that it resembles the voracity ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... was the only vestige of furniture to be seen. The 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
... executed with great diligence. Truly marvellous was the grace with 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 whole district in company with Fra Diamante, a friar of the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... 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. ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... gathered in a heap, like animals in their dens, uttered a kind of hollow and continual rattling noise. Others, leaning against the wall immovable, looked fixedly at the sun. An old man, of monstrous obesity, seated on a wooden chair, devoured his pittance with animal voracity, casting on either side oblique angry glances. Some walked rapidly, describing a circle, limiting themselves to a very small space. This strange exercise would last for entire hours. Seated on the ground, others swayed their bodies continually backward and forward, ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... cleared from snow, and a fire was quickly kindled, in 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 ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... 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 ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... 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 working with his own hands, insensible to heat ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... 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
... of the spinning bait by regular revolutions of the winch is not always a gain, since, with all his shark-like voracity, the pike has his little caprices, and sometimes suspects the lure which is moving evenly on a straight course through the water. The bait spun home by the left hand manipulating the line while the right gives the proper motion to the rod top is considered best for pike if not for salmon. One of ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... the bee in this respect, that the male seems to have a most rotten time. For one thing he is nearly always about two sizes smaller than the female. Owing to that and to what The Encyclopaedia Britannica humorously describes as "the greater voracity" of the female (there is a lot of quiet fun in The Encyclopaedia Britannica), he is a very brave spider who makes a proposal of marriage. "He makes his advances to his mate at the risk of his life and is not infrequently killed and eaten by her before or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... dozen raw onions, which he added to the feast; and we ate with such appetite, that very soon we were reduced to the melancholy dessert of sucking our fingers. We washed the whole down with some water from the rivulet, and only then (such had been our voracity) we thought of questioning each other concerning the object of our respective journeys. From my dress, he perceived me to be a dervish, and my story was soon told: as for himself, he was a courier belonging to the Governor of Asterabad, and, to my joy and surprise, was carrying the happy intelligence ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... lived one of these old gluttonous dreamers. I think he was the champion eater of the world. Many a time I have seen him at my grandfather's table, and the viands and battercakes vanished "like the baseless fabric of a vision,"—he left not "a wreck behind." But one day, in the voracity of his shark-like appetite, he unfortunately undertook too large a contract for the retirement of an immense slice of ham. It scraped its way down his rebellious esophagus for about two inches, and lodged as tightly as a bullet in a rusty ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... advice on marriage: "Don't!" Sue said. "It has lost half its charms by becoming so fashionable;" and Hal added, as an unanswerable argument, "You'll not be able to get enough to eat." As to his veracity on this subject we cannot vouch, though we can testify to his voracity, and mischievously throw ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... 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 said to come and assist ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... to-day, as always, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of distinction and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth and urbanity, may a man in reason attempt to insure his books against oblivion's voracity. ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... 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 had befallen us, at least in ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... 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
... 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... 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 he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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.
... "Voracity killed him, as it did Scott's; he died unexpectedly by the kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... a trusty hand, in the person of one Ki Nihy, who is shortly committing himself to the protection of his ancestors and the voracity of the unbounded Bitter Waters; and with brightness and gold it will doubtless reach you in the course of twelve or eighteen moons. The superstitious here, this person may describe, when they wish to send messages from one to another, inscribe upon the outer cover a written ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... 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 them out around their ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... upon his sustenance. Apart from the ordinary fare, he demolished about eighteen inches of a long French loaf at his side, tearing pieces from it with his short stubby fingers and filling his mouth with great wads of crust and dough. Richard afterwards learnt that this voracity of appetite was nerve begotten. In moments of acute agitation it was Van Diest's custom to eat enormously on the theory that a full belly begets a placid mind. His little piglike eyes darted to and ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... 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 it over to his companion; ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... up with an infinite greed. A gnawing voracity, which devoured the devourer, seemed to be the indwelling and propelling power of the whole ghostly apparition. I lay for a few moments simply imbruted with terror; when another cloud, obscuring the moon, delivered me from the immediately ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... went to the place of execution wagging his tail. He became insensible in two minutes; but upon being laid on the grass, he revived from his trance in a few seconds, without the process of immersion in the lake, which is generally mentioned as necessary to his recovery. From the voracity with which he bolted down a loaf of bread which I bought for him, the vapour does not seem to injure the animal functions. Addison seems to have been very particular in his experiments upon the vapour of this cavern. He ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... and daily hand—the Bible, "Aesop's Fables," "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." ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... to with the voracity of a hound after hunting. Sponge, too, made the most of his time, as did two or three ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... 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, then, they ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... essential to long success, defining success even in its most narrow and mundane way, might be worked out in a hundred cases, though it would not suit these pages. Many of the finer intellectual tastes have a similar restraining effect they prevent, or tend to prevent, a greedy voracity after the good things of life, which makes both men and nations in excessive haste to be rich and famous, often makes them do too much and do it ill, and so often leaves them at last without money and ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... the only condition is that the hungry shall be clever or witty starvelings who can pay for their dinners with their brains. However, when men of talent cease to be hungry they generally become snobs, and will take the fly of the season with as much voracity as any ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... he turned them 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
... we sat down in the ditch together, side by side, and began to eat. And now I noticed that when he thought my eye was upon him, my companion ate with a due deliberation and nicety, and when he thought it was off, with a voracity that was painful to witness. And after we had eaten a while in silence, he turned ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... see them," I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. Of course he was right and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... effect on the mentality of birds and animals and even fishes. The papers 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 unprecedented. I remember, when I was cruising in the China Seas in the year 1854, witnessing ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... dish, no matter who has cooked it, and immediately divine its lack or its surplusage, and prescribe a treatment that transforms it into something indescribably different and delicious—My, how I do eat! I am quite dumbfounded by the unfailing voracity of my appetite. Already am I quite convinced that I am glad Miss ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... against the blue mass of water, made its slow descent. But 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
... M. Forbes, the Canton millionaire, preserved the balance at one end of the table, while Hawthorne, an oasis in a desert, served as the nearest approach to a human being, at the other. "How he buried his eyes in his plate and ate with such a voracity! that no one should dare to ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... ordinarily, two kills a day—one in the morning and one after night. They immediately devour the entire carcass, after which they lie up and sleep for a few hours. Fortunately their numbers are comparatively few; otherwise there would be no other life within Caspak. It is their very voracity that keeps their numbers down to a point which permits other forms of life to persist, for even in the season of love the great males often turn upon their own mates and devour them, while both males and females occasionally devour their young. ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Fish were to be taken in 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 make a line. At the end of the line was a bait fixed over a strong fish-bone, ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... building, the moon, an active agent of destruction, will incessantly corrode the stones of the frontage, the shafts of the columns, and that it will efface in a few years all the projecting ornaments; and hence the fear of the moon's voracity will lead to the upsetting of all the views, the studies, and the well-digested plans of several architects. Place a meteorologist on the council, and, despite the authority of the nurses, a whole scaffolding ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 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 caused by heavy ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... light vehicle; but, when much haste is required, or any very heavy goods are to be conveyed, more than treble or quadruple that number are harnessed to the vehicle. M. de Lesseps [2] gives an almost incredible account of this. He is speaking of the voracity of these poor beasts, in the midst of the snowy desert, with little ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... particularly the duckinmallard, the most abundant of all. There are also great numbers of snakes resembling our garter-snakes in appearance, and like them not poisonous. Our hunters brought in three deer, a goose, some ducks, an eagle, and a tiger-cat. Such is the extreme voracity of the vultures, that they had devoured in the space of a few hours four of the deer killed this morning; and one of our men declared that they had besides dragged a large buck about thirty yards, skinned it, and broken ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... two 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 ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... 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 ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... only vestige of furniture to be seen. The 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
... stew made of fish, the gift of their hosts. In turn the officers had added to the menu a large piece of fat moose which was devoured with voracity. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... to look in 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 had ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... are supposed to show that the animals have undergone changes in size and that such vast masses require untold ages to accumulate. The first is a biological problem. As for the second, the elements of savage voracity and wastefulness, of uncertainty as to cubical contents on uneven surface, and of the number of mouths to fill, make it hazardous to construct a chronological table on a shell-heap. Hudson's village sites in Patagonia contain pottery, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... imprudently left open, he beheld his young favourite making a hearty breakfast on a very noble collection of insects. In the first transports of his anger, he resolved to strangle the monkey in his arms: but his rage immediately gave way to pity, when he perceived that the crime of its voracity had carried the punishment along with it. In eating the beetles, it had swallowed several of the pins on which they were transfixed. Its agony, consequently, became great; and all his efforts were unable ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... with 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... abandoned him. Topertoe, of the gout, and he were old acquaintances and companions, and had spent many a merry night together—both, as the proverb has it, being tarred with the same stick. Topertoe was as great a glutton as the other, but without his desperate voracity in food, whilst in drink he equalled if he did not surpass him. Manifold would have forgotten every thing about the dinner had he not from time to time been reminded of it by ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... 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 he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quite true; 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
... (pretty creatures with feathery 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, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... pair become, that when Boswell left England to continue his studies at Utrecht, Johnson accompanied him in the stage-coach to Harwich, amusing him on the way by his frankness of address to fellow-passengers, and by the voracity of his appetite. He gave him some excellent advice, remarking of a moth which fluttered into a candle, "that creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was Boswell." He refuted Berkeley by striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it. As the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... at separate tables is generally an indication of voracity. Traces of it may be found in Homer, and other writers who have described ancient manners. The same practice has also been observed among the people of Otaheite; who occasionally devour vast quantities ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... As I lay awake their myriad voices about and above me made a great chorus, really grand and impressive, out of which for a few seconds at a time there came bursts of harmony which I could hardly separate from the idea of a vast, distant chorus of human voices. Against their voracity no ordinary bar is a bar at all. We had gone to their haunts provided with netting which at home gave immunity, but through its meshes these mosquitos inserted their bills, then their heads, then struggled through bodily, and came down upon us like demons. We were dressed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... and 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 stomach tortured him ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... but those who have travelled on the Upper Amazons can have any idea of the number and voracity of the insect torments which work their wicked will on the bodies of the unfortunates exposed to their attacks. The "sancudos," or small sand-flies, form by far the most important section. In the villages, round which the forest is cleared away for some distance, the sancudos are generally ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the guest, before whom the whole slice of ham and half a brick loaf disappeared almost in a twinkling. The steward appeared with a pot of coffee, in time to cut off another slice of ham, which the waif attacked with the same voracity as before. When it was consumed, and the young Norwegian glanced wistfully at the leg before him, as though his capacity for cold ham was not yet exhausted, the captain began to consider whether he ought not to consult the surgeon of the ship before he permitted ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... which is the only living representative of the fishes that existed in the early ages of the earth's history,—and which, by its formidable array of teeth, its impenetrable armor, and its swiftness and voracity, gives us some idea of the terrible creatures which peopled the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... kindly treatment, to 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 ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... economy which recommended it to her; 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
... his voracity, and he promised it should be held in check as to the point which he had thought for a moment might be worked so effectively into ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... to part with you; but only the king of historians is worthy to enjoy the queen of apples." Then, plunging his hand into the basket, he snatched up another, hap-hazard, and began eating it with savage voracity, as if made reckless by this act of self-denial. Re-seating himself as he had chosen his apple, hap-hazard, he missed his chair, and keeled over, bringing his heels in the air where his head should have been, and his head on the rug where the dog and cat were, and ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... wild beast.—Ver. 782. Antoninus Liberalis and Apollodorus say that this was a fox, which was called 'the Teumesian,' from Teumesus, a mountain of Boeotia, and that the Thebans, to appease its voracity, were wont to give it a child to devour every month. Palaephatus says that it was not a wild beast, but a ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... him the supper she had prepared for herself, and chafed his hard, emaciated, dirty hand till the warmth returned to it. Then he ate, with difficulty at first, then with slow voracity, all she had put ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... of this 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
... convinced that for most persons the views thus laid down by Mr. Harrison are wrong; and that what he describes, with characteristic vigor, as "an impotent voracity for desultory information," is in reality a most desirable and a not too common form of mental appetite. I have no sympathy whatever with the horror he expresses at the "incessant accumulation of fresh books." I am never tempted to regret that Gutenberg was born into the world. I care not at ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... character, who could pass through a hole and not feel inconvenienced. According to the quantity of provisions which he had eaten and carried off, he must have possessed a human stomach of remarkable voracity. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... legislation, in poetry, and in romance. They renounced that brutal intemperance to which all the other branches of the great German family were too much inclined. The polite luxury of the Norman presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of his Saxon and Danish neighbours. He loved to display his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons, well ordered tournaments, banquets delicate rather than abundant, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sadness, but we drew apart sadly, 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, unable to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... leaves, as she did, for the sake of her young. The panther is a ferocious and almost untamable animal, whose nature and habits are like those of the cat; except that the nature and powers of this domestic creature are in the panther immensely magnified, in strength and voracity. It is in the American forest what the tiger is in Africa and India, a dangerous and savage animal, the terror of all other creatures, as well as of the Indian and ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... 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 ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and going to a closet or pantry in the room, brought out some fragments of cold meat and bread and put them on the table. He asked for brandy, and for water. These she produced likewise; and he ate and drank with the voracity of a famished hound. All the time he was so engaged she kept at the uttermost distance of the chamber, and sat there shuddering, but with her face towards him. She never turned her back upon him once; and although when she passed him (as she was obliged ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... 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 have laughed on a desert island. But his grief was gregarious. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... country was 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 ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... his appetite, and the voracity of his capacious stomach, he had diminished his paternal estate; but yet, even then, did his shocking hunger remain undiminished, and the craving of his insatiable appetite continued in full vigour. At last, after he has swallowed ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... now descended a swarm of office-seekers. The Republican party had never been in power before, and these patriotic people exceeded in number and voracity those that had assailed any American President before. To be accessible to all such was the normal duty of a President; it was perhaps additionally incumbent on him at this time. When in the course of nature the number of office-seekers ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... search and snarl and forage hungrily; A worthless prairie vagabond is he. Luckless the settler's heifer which astray Falls to his fangs and violence a prey; Useless her blatant calling when his teeth Are fast upon her quivering flank—beneath His fell voracity she falls and dies With inarticulate and piteous cries, Unheard, unheeded in the barren waste, To be devoured with savage greed and haste. Up the horizon once again he prowls And far across its desolation howls; Sneaking and satisfied his lair he ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... 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 ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... Frau von Treumann, putting up a protesting hand, "you are very kind. Two cups are a limit beyond which voracity itself could not go. What do you say? You have had three? Oh, well, you are young, and young people can play tricks with their digestions with less danger ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... a very short time from this he appears to have devoured eagerly the contents of every volume he could lay his hands on. He had a thirst for knowledge at large—for any kind of information, and as the merest child read with a careless voracity books of heraldry, history, astronomy, theology, and such other subjects as would repel most children, and perhaps one may say, most men. At the age of eight we hear of him reading 'all day or as long as ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... ruin. The author was pilloried, fined, and imprisoned; his publisher condemned in the penalty of five hundred pounds, and barred for ever from printing and selling books, and the licenser removed and punished. Such was the fatality attending the book of a man whose literary voracity produced one of the most tremendous indigestions, in a malady ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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, is absorbed by Mrs. Norton) and into ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Sometimes, when a bear becomes troublesome in a neighbourhood by his depredations, the villagers turn out in a body to destroy him; and wolves are the enemies of all. In winter, when hard pressed by hunger, a flock of these are very dangerous, and numberless persons have fallen victims to their voracity. A dreadful circumstance relating to wolves occurred near this ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... like tigers that have learned German imperfectly, and were trying to swear, in choice Teutonic, about the peculiar qualities of Limburger cheese. In their sudden subversion, the Israelites dropped three fine watches out of their pockets, and the mule, with an unprecedented voracity, and determined on having a good time, ate the chronometers without any apparent detriment to digestion. The owners of the watches were frenzied. They glanced at my beast, and were about to devour him, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... bee in this respect, that the male seems to have a most rotten time. For one thing he is nearly always about two sizes smaller than the female. Owing to that and to what The Encyclopaedia Britannica humorously describes as "the greater voracity" of the female (there is a lot of quiet fun in The Encyclopaedia Britannica), he is a very brave spider who makes a proposal of marriage. "He makes his advances to his mate at the risk of his life and is not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— Philosophy 4 - A Story of Harvard University • Owen Wister
... of execution wagging his tail. He became insensible in two minutes; but upon being laid on the grass, he revived from his trance in a few seconds, without the process of immersion in the lake, which is generally mentioned as necessary to his recovery. From the voracity with which he bolted down a loaf of bread which I bought for him, the vapour does not seem to injure the animal functions. Addison seems to have been very particular in his experiments upon the vapour of this cavern. He found that a pistol would not take ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... collected with research, selected with judgment, and skilfully arranged and described. The interest with which one reads is sustained and continuous, and you devour a two-volume inventory of stoves, grates, and ovens, with the voracity of a parish school-boy, and then—ask for ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.11.17 • Various
... 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, and then seemed to chew it at leisure. ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... a gyp at Cambridge, that the "men" used to have breakfast-parties for the very same purpose; and the exhibition of the morning acted infallibly upon the stomach, and caused the young students to eat with much voracity. ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... him, and his eyes fairly glared as he turned them 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
... been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... the prevalent wind at the present day 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 ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... old gentleman's hearty invitation. I had not tasted food since early dawn, and was so outrageously hungry and eat with such a right good will, that he often stopped and laughed heartily at my voracity. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... by him, 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 ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... hastily arose from the table and gazed on the little fellow in bewilderment. As soon as it dawned upon him what the trouble was, he hastily got the remaining biscuit and gave it to Belton. He also discovered that his voracity had made enemies of the rest of the children, and he very adroitly passed a five ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... was the champion eater of the world. Many a time I have seen him at my grandfather's table, and the viands and battercakes vanished "like the baseless fabric of a vision,"—he left not "a wreck behind." But one day, in the voracity of his shark-like appetite, he unfortunately undertook too large a contract for the retirement of an immense slice of ham. It scraped its way down his rebellious esophagus for about two inches, and lodged as tightly as a ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... was the last thing I was likely to be guilty of. I wished myself at home. The tales I had heard of the voracity and fierceness of the striped catamount were made much more terrible by the darkness. My position was so cramped and the old sleigh so hard that I had to squirm occasionally; but every time I did so, ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... was tearing open her own envelope. With a well-satisfied smile, the bearer of these communications seized a sandwich in one hand and poured himself out some tea with the other. He ate and drank with the restraint of good-breeding, but with a voracity which gave point to his plea of starvation. A few yards away, the breathless silence between the two women had given place to an almost hysterical series ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that you can know little of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... by little before his voracity, and in contentment greater than virtue can give, he sank back upon his ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... the adjutant had not said a word. He attended strictly to the business that had brought him here. His voracity attracted no attention, because everybody was used to it. Off and on he merely emitted a species of grunt in token of approval or dissent of what had been said. He was still eating when the hostess finally gave the signal to rise. Then everybody wished everybody ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... 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 ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... 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 read fluently Kid, ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... your deer, do not now rule over them, but are subservient to them; and behold how great an abuse arises from too much patience; for they attack our sheep with such an unheard-of rage, and unusual voracity, that from many they are become few; from being innumerable, only numerous." To make her story more probable, she caused some wool to be inserted between the intestines of two stags which had been embowelled; and her husband, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... into the tin, brought out a hunch of bread and a knob of cheese. The voracity with which he fell on them, soon, with him also, stopped up the channels of speech. Louie, alarmed perhaps by the rapidity with which the mouthfuls disappeared, slid up on her heels and claimed ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... account already 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; ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... under great difficulties which are becoming daily more and more serious. The various Powers cast upon us looks of tiger-like voracity, hustling each other in their endeavours to be the first to seize upon our innermost territories. They think that China, having neither money nor troops, would never venture to go to war with them. They fail to understand, ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... cupidity, lust, concupiscence. edge of appetite, edge of hunger; torment of Tantalus; sweet tooth, lickerish tooth^; itching palm; longing eye, wistful eye, sheep's eye. [excessive desire for money] greed &c 817.1. voracity &c (gluttony) 957. passion, rage, furore^, mania, manie^; inextinguishable desire; dipsomania, kleptomania. [Person who desires] lover, amateur, votary, devotee, aspirant, solicitant, candidate, applicant, supplicant; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was ready. This meal was devoured by my worthy relative with avidity and voracity. His shipboard diet had turned his interior into a perfect gulf. The repast, which was more Danish than Icelandic, was in itself nothing, but the excessive hospitality of our host ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... succeeded in 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 ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... those masterpieces of voracity for which the region is renowned; yet the undoubted facts related around our camp-fires, and otherwise, a few of which follow, almost beggar belief. Mr. Young, of our party, an old Hudson's Bay officer, knew of sixteen ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... sword-fish, children; a monster of a dangerous species, and of extreme voracity. If, by way of reciprocity, the fish have a museum at the bottom of the sea, they will have some fine specimens of the human race that have become the prey of this creature; and it may be that we were on the way to join ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... themselves up within 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
... children addicted to secret vice. At the commencement of the practice, they almost invariably manifest great voracity for food, gorging themselves in the most gluttonous manner. As the habit becomes fixed, digestion becomes impaired, and the appetite is sometimes almost wanting, and ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 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 ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... the power to stand, she fell to the floor; but recovering herself sufficiently, she made her way to the pantry, and feeling herself quite voracious, and fearing that she might now offend God by her voracity, compelled herself to breakfast on dry bread and water-eating a large six-penny loaf before she felt at all stayed or satisfied. She says she did get light, but it was all in her body and none in her mind-and this lightness of body lasted a long time. Oh! ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... 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 said ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... of the rapidity and voracity of the flames—people crying for help in every direction, 'insomuch that the people were so amazed that they knew not which way to turne, nor where the most neede was'—and of the number of people who were burned and the desolation of ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... sums, by vending an artificial tea, chiefly composed of yellow saunders, senna leaves, and fennel seed, which was puffed off under the specious appellation of Tea for prolonging life; which, at that time, was swallowed with such voracity all over the continent, that few could subsist without it. Its celebrity was of short duration, and none ever lived long ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... more! Surely this was playing at ducks and drakes with their 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... servant re-entered with the wine and viands, Maltravers followed him out of the room, and bade him see the note sent immediately. On returning, he found Cesarini devouring the food before him with all the voracity of famine. It was a dreadful sight!—the intellect ruined, the mind darkened, the wild, fierce animal ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lives were prolonged by the air of the country, might obtain these succors at Montmorency, near to which I lived; as if there were no old people, except in Paris, and that it was impossible for them to live in any other place. Madam le Vasseur who eat a great deal, and with extreme voracity, was subject to overflowings of bile and to strong diarrhoeas, which lasted several days, and served her instead of clysters. At Paris she neither did nor took anything for them, but left nature to itself. She observed the same rule at the Hermitage, knowing ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... frore, as one side of the streat is not unfrequentedly Outside the rools so that if you take him that side the politician cannot Run him in which is the wulgar for lagging him for not [waring Mussles I have] ockasionaly done bobys this Way myself so that I am convinzed of my voracity, the lesson we learn from this is that dogs should be treeted kindly and not Injected to unkind tretemant there? was Ice a dog with the pattrynamie of dognes who lived in a tub but; tubs are not helthy kenels because, they Roal when you dont stick brix under, which teechus ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... to look at a dish, no matter who has cooked it, and immediately divine its lack or its surplusage, and prescribe a treatment that transforms it into something indescribably different and delicious—My, how I do eat! I am quite dumbfounded by the unfailing voracity of my appetite. Already am I quite convinced that I am glad Miss West is making ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... down his foot. He was not much of a Stoic, and exhibited a liking for food which his namesake would have had reason to blame. No doubt Enjolras, the pure and sober youth, would have said to him, as the angel did to Swedenborg, "You eat too much." We rather encouraged this amusing voracity, analogous to that of monkeys, and Enjolras grew to a size and weight very uncommon among domestic cats. Then I bethought myself of having him shaved in the style of poodles, in order to bring out completely his leonine appearance. He retained his mane ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... manifest by loud and continued screams, and incessant restless leaps from branch to branch. The leopard meanwhile walks round and round the tree, with his eyes firmly fixed upon his victims, till at last exhausted by terror, and prostrated by vain exertions to escape, one or more falls a prey to his voracity. So rivetted is the attention of both during the struggle, that a sportsman, on one occasion, attracted by the noise, was enabled to approach within an uncomfortable distance of the leopard, before he discovered ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... it is not unfrequently found to contain 'a choice assortment'—as the Calcutta advertisers have it—of gold, silver, or brass bangles and anklets, which have not been so expeditiously digested as their fair owners, victims of the monster's voracity. A little fat Brahminee child, 'farci an ris,' must be a tempting and tender bonne bouche to these river gourmands. Horrific legends such as the above, together with a great deal of valuable advice on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... the dogs had already begun to be very voracious. Everything that came in their way disappeared; whips, ski-bindings, lashings, etc., were regarded as delicacies. If one put down anything for a moment, it vanished. With some of them this voracity went so far that ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... parts of the world, some to stretch their limbs, others to replenish the waste that seems to be constantly going on in the stomachs of the traveling public. I don't know how it is, but it appears to me that people who travel by railway are always either tired, thirsty, or hungry. The voracity with which plates of soup, cutlets, sandwiches, salad, scalding hot tea, wine, beer, and brandy are swallowed down by these hungry and thirsty Russians, is quite as striking as any thing I ever saw done in the same line at Washoe. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... by a trusty hand, in the person of one Ki Nihy, who is shortly committing himself to the protection of his ancestors and the voracity of the unbounded Bitter Waters; and with brightness and gold it will doubtless reach you in the course of twelve or eighteen moons. The superstitious here, this person may describe, when they wish to send ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... made when the rear guard of the army filed before them; 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, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... 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 way, but, what is most singular, when obliged to be abstemious they scarcely eat the amount of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... 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 in the shape of food. In consequence of this habit of consuming ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... 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 unquestionably soon ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... alike unfit to reign over Rome. Galba was very old and very incompetent, Otho was a declared profligate, and Vitellius was a glutton of such extraordinary powers that his name has become a synonyme for voracity. He had by his arts and his skill as a courtier made himself a favorite with four emperors of widely differing character,—Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. The suicide of Otho had now made him emperor himself, and he gave way without stint ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in Devonshire-terrace. A death in the family followed, the older and more gifted of his ravens having indulged the same illicit taste for putty and paint which had been fatal to his predecessor. Voracity killed him, as it killed Scott's. He died unexpectedly before the kitchen-fire. "He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of Cuckoo!" The letter which told me this (31st of October) announced ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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 ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... at all a success. It is true that stifling atmosphere, in tense heat, and many varieties of nastiness and nudity are not promoters of appetite; but even had I been given a clearer stage and more favourable conducers towards voracity, I must still have proved but a mere nibbler of sturgeon in the eyes of such a ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... grass, and upon the leaves of the jungle. These creatures insinuate themselves through all the openings in a person's dress—up the trousers, under the waistcoat, down the neck, up the wrists, and in fact everywhere, drawing blood with insatiable voracity, and leaving an unpleasant irritation ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... and excited me for a time, and when things slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago—eating and drinking, I remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity. I did the queerest things to distract myself—no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle. Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some days ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... slipped into the room, and under the table, without being detected, thus announced their presence to their indulgent master. He did not repulse them, but managed, without attracting notice, to give them a share of everything on his plate, and was especially amused at the almost insatiable voracity of the old black cat—who had evidently been fasting in his hiding-place in the attic. He actually seemed to enjoy, like an epicure, the rich and dainty viands that had replaced the frugal fare of long ago, and ate so much that when the ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... onslaught. Vainly did I thrust my hands into my socks, tie handkerchiefs round my face and neck, and so arrange the rest of my night attire as to leave no opening by which they could crawl in. Our necks and wrists especially seemed circled with rings of fire. Anything like the number and voracity of the fleas of that 'happy village' I have never, during a long and varied intimacy ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 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 ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... 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, ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... incomprehensible to those living in others, plays a part that is but little appreciated or understood; whether it be the question of diet, dress, or custom, climate exerts its influence in no uncertain manner. As Sulpicius Severus remarked to the Greek monks, when they accused the Gaulish monks with voracity and gluttony, "That which you of Greece consider as superfluous, the climate of Gaul renders into a positive necessity." So of all physical needs and passions,—they are subject to a similar law. Those who have read ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... 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 ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... small stone, carefully balanced, and with his feet close together, he made a beautiful cast. It was gracefully done; it was vigorously, manfully done—considering the difficulty of the position, and the voracity of the midges—and would have been undoubtedly successful but for the branch of a tree which grew on the opposite bank and overhung the stream. This branch Mr Sudberry, in his eagerness, did not observe. In casting, he thrust the end of his rod violently ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... fastened to a rough rail. I could not but admire the instinctive care displayed in the formation of this exquisite piece of insect architecture to guard the embryo animal from injury, either from the voracity of birds or the effect of rain, which could scarcely find ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... 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 ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... neglect all the abiding parts of knowledge for the sake of the evanescent parts is really to know nothing worth knowing. It is in the end the same, whether we do not use our minds for serious study at all, or whether we exhaust them by an impotent voracity for desultory "information"—a thing as fruitful as whistling. Of the two evils I prefer the former. At least, in that case, the mind is healthy and open. It is not gorged and enfeebled by excess in that which cannot nourish, much less enlarge ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the moon, an active agent of destruction, will incessantly corrode the stones of the frontage, the shafts of the columns, and that it will efface in a few years all the projecting ornaments; and hence the fear of the moon's voracity will lead to the upsetting of all the views, the studies, and the well-digested plans of several architects. Place a meteorologist on the council, and, despite the authority of the nurses, a whole scaffolding of gratuitous suppositions ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... you mean me to understand that the voracity of the growing animal will be satisfied with ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... quickly kindled, in 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 ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... monsters of the swamps and lagoons of stagnant waters, the alligator ranks the first in size and voracity; yet man has nothing to fear from him; and though there are many stories among the cotton planters about negroes being carried away by this immense reptile, I do firmly believe that few human beings have ever been seized alive by the ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... his tears; they heard their own hearts 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 ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Lovibond had sat at table with the guests, though their voracity had almost turned his stomach. At sight of the green light of greed in their eyes he had said to himself, "Davy is a rough fellow, but a born Christian. These creatures are hogs. Why doesn't his gorge rise at them?" When the supper was done, and while the ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... situation, the first moment they have nothing ready at hand to satisfy the cravings of appetite, our fowls must fall the victims to their voracity. If there are any hopes of succeeding in the introduction of domestic animals in this country, it must be in the populous bays to the northward, where the inhabitants seem to be the more civilized, and are already accustomed to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... by the same organs; that is, by extracting the oxygen from the atmosphere as well as from the water in which it is dissolved. They pass a great part of their life in the air; but if they escape from the sea to avoid the voracity of the Dorado, they meet in the air the Frigate-bird, the Albatross, and others, which seize them in their flight. Thus, on the banks of the Orinoco, herds of the Cabiai, which rush from the water to escape the crocodile, become the prey ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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
... the terrible consequences of his own words, but yielding to the inexorable fatality of his situation, "sometimes madness takes a stupid and brutal form; the unfortunate creature, who is attacked by it, preserves nothing human but the shape—has only the instincts of the lower animals—eats with voracity, and moves ever backwards and forwards in the cell, in which such a being is obliged to be confined. That ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... 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 mother. ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... common-sense; and it is excellent thus to comprehend that to-day, as always, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of distinction and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth and urbanity, may a man in reason attempt to insure his books against oblivion's voracity. ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... Sansculottism keep life in; since not otherwise. On the whole, as Camille Desmoulins says once, "while the Sansculottes fight, the Monsieurs must pay." So there come Impots Progressifs, Ascending Taxes; which consume, with fast-increasing voracity, and 'superfluous-revenue' of men: beyond fifty-pounds a-year you are not exempt; rising into the hundreds you bleed freely; into the thousands and tens of thousands, you bleed gushing. Also there come Requisitions; there comes 'Forced-Loan of a Milliard,' ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Fables," "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 ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... alone," she said, feeling for the trouble. "And so am I," she added, thoughtfully. She should have noticed his eyes at that last. He had developed a sort of controlled voracity for endearment, but he never asked for it. In the old days he had taken his own masterfully, with no doubts. Now he waited. He did not starve. She cajoled him and coaxed his appetite and patted the pillows, and made pretty, laughing eyes at him and fate quite in her habitual manner. ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... was well under way now. Mrs. Bence brought the last of the hot bread, and shuffled into a seat. The old man at the head of the board returned to his feeding, but with somewhat moderated voracity. At length, pretty fully gorged, he raised his head from over his plate and looked about him for diversion. Again his attention was ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... 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 ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... our masters regaled themselves with the raw fat of the goat: they appeared to consider this as a very great rarity. So soon as the meat was baked, and withdrawn from the fire, our Arabians, without allowing us time to clean it from the sand, devoured it with incredible voracity. After having thoroughly gnawed the bones, they made use of their nails for scraping off any flesh which remained upon them; they then threw them to us, with orders to eat expeditiously, and reload our camels, so that our ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... 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 ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... swarmed about the houses of wealthy farmers, supplicating a morsel to keep body and soul together, resembled nothing which our English readers ever had an opportunity of seeing. Ragged, emaciated creatures, tottered about with an expression of wildness and voracity in their gaunt features; fathers and mothers reeled under the burthen of their beloved children, the latter either sick, or literally expiring for want of food; and the widow, in many instances, was compelled to lay down her head to die, with the wail, the feeble ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... as a rule, is essential to long success, defining success even in its most narrow and mundane way, might be worked out in a hundred cases, though it would not suit these pages. Many of the finer intellectual tastes have a similar restraining effect they prevent, or tend to prevent, a greedy voracity after the good things of life, which makes both men and nations in excessive haste to be rich and famous, often makes them do too much and do it ill, and so often leaves them at last without money ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
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