"Cockatoo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Don't! It makes me want to get out there again. What colour that was! Opal and umber and amber and claret and brick-red and sulphur—cockatoo-crest-sulphur—against brown, with a nigger-black rock sticking up in the middle of it all, and a decorative frieze of camels festooning in front of a pure pale turquoise sky." He began to walk up and down. "And yet, you know, if you try to give these people ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the cockatoo replied, "My beak will do as well; I'd rather eat my victuals thus Than go and learn ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... corpse had grown cold, heavy steps were heard on the staircase, and Dick and Laura entered, one with a quantity of cockatoo-like flutterings, the other steadily, like a big and ponderous animal. At a glance they saw that all was over, and in silence they sat down, their hands resting on the table. The man spoke hesitatingly in awkward phrases ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... (after the usual greetings). I hope, dearest MARIA, you will excuse me if I am not quite in my usual spirits this evening; but my cockatoo, whom I have had for ages, has been in convulsions the whole afternoon, and though I left him calmer, done up in warm flannel on the rug in front of the fire, and the maid promised faithfully to sit up with him, and telegraph if there was the slightest change, I can't help feeling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... hither, pretty cockatoo, Come and learn your letters; And you shall have a knife and fork To eat ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... flowers, one finds or fancies singular natural affinities. I flatter myself with being able always to find hepatica, if there is any within reach, for I was brought up with it ("Cockatoo he know me berry well"); but other persons, who were brought up with May-flower, and remember searching for it with their almost baby-fingers, can find that better. The most remarkable instance of these natural affinities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... no means of increasing the supply of food-stuffs should be neglected, we have much pleasure in passing on "Retired Diplomat's" suggestion to the authorities of the Zoo. Personally we prefer Cockatoo en casserole. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... coronatus). It is of a green colour, and at the back of its head rises a hood of red feathers bordered with blue, which it can elevate or depress at pleasure. It is the only American parrot which resembles the cockatoo of Australia. It is of a solemn, morose, and irritable disposition. The natives often keep the bird in the house for the purpose of seeing the irascible creature expand its beautiful feathers, which it readily does when excited. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... was indescribable when the horn was drawn forth. Shavings flew everywhere. The sawdust was like a butcher's shop. There were records too, some broken, all scratched. When set going it made a noise like a cockatoo with a cold. Decently covered with a cloth it was interned in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... the landed gentry of England. The farmer is usually legally known as a 'selector,' because under the Land Act he selects a piece of ground perhaps in the middle of the squatter's leasehold and purchases it on credit for agriculture. A 'cockatoo' is a selector who works his piece of land out in two or three years, and having done nothing to improve it, decamps to select in a new district. A 'run' is the least improved kind of land used for sheep, but the word is used almost alternatively with 'station,' which denotes ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... water to serve our purpose. The creek is very large, with the finest gum-trees we have yet seen, all sizes and heights. This seems to be a favourite place for the natives to camp, as there are eleven worleys in one encampment. We saw here a number of new parrots, the black cockatoo, and numerous other birds. The creek runs over a space of about two miles, coming from the west; the bed sandy. After leaving it, on a bearing of 329 degrees, for nine miles, we passed over a plain of as ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... should have the offer; and as soon as she saw that they and their governess were in ignorance, she turned it off; but she had said enough to fill Christabel with anxiety and desire to know more; and as soon as the dinner was over, and the little girls had run off together to visit Ida's beautiful cockatoo in the conservatory, she turned to Fraulein Munsterthal, and begged to hear whether she knew more than ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but to pass the night well above the jungle perils in the suapattah hut, like a cockatoo screeching defiance at a cat from the safety of its perch; and to which safety you climb almost flat on your face by means of a rocking, slender bamboo ladder, and with about as much grace as ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... looking-glass and his opera-dancer—a fellow who, just because he is born a gentleman, is set to command grey-headed men before he can command his own meanest passions. Good heavens! that the lives of free men should be entrusted to such a stuffed cockatoo; and that free men should be such traitors to their country, traitors to their own flesh and blood, as to sell themselves, for a shilling a day and the smirks of the nursery-maids, to ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... of bread then they fed it, instead Of the flesh of the white Cockatoo, Which once was its food in that wild neighborhood Where ranges the sweet Kangaroo, That too Is game for ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... a young lady to the piano, and looking as if she by no means approved of such folly, though everybody had listened to the Poor Old Cockatoo, laughed and applauded heartily; and the ensuing performance seemed to be unappreciated by any one except ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... saw what looked like a brown stain on the southern sky near the horizon. He remembered having seen something similar to that at Oodnadatta, and he knew at once that it was caused by a big moving mob of stock. Vaughan was near the troughs, vainly trying to entice a galah (a cockatoo with rose-coloured breast and grey wings and back) to eat bread out of his hand, when Sax startled both him and the bird by shouting: "They're ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... a Beaver, no better dressed than one of our navvies, and who stamped on the Cat's toes, and made her squeak out so shrilly, that she made my ears tingle; then came a Parroquet, dressed like a dandy, and with him were two fashionable birds, Miss Cockatoo and Miss Snowy Owl; then followed an old Crocodile, looking like one of those withered Indian nurses, and in her arms she carried a young Frog that might have been an Indian baby. Besides these, there was a young Monkey, exactly like my brother's boy, ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... Cocky came. Lettice's airs and graces bewitched the old lady who called in the yellow chariot, and was so like a cockatoo herself—a cockatoo in a citron velvet bonnet, with a bird of Paradise feather. When that old lady put up her eye-glass, she would have frightened a yard-dog; but Lettice stood on tip-toes and stroked the feather, saying, "What a love-e-ly ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... "Menagerie", because of a Duchess of Norfolk who kept an aviary within its precincts. Mrs. Delany, in 1756, thus alludes to this place: "We went there on Sunday evening; but I only saw a crown bird and a most delightful cockatoo, with yellow breast and topping". There is an air of pleasing disorder about the drives, and one is occasionally reminded ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... know why a man who possessed the most beautiful and noble Bird of Paradise—a bird of rare plumage and wonderful qualities—should suddenly see more beauty in an ordinary Cockatoo, whose only attraction was its yellow feathers—a Cockatoo that screamed monotonously as it swung backward and forward on its perch, and would eat sugar out of the hand of any stranger while it cried 'Pretty Poll.' ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn
... bits of red or blue paper, and fasten it together with a pinch of boiled rice. The string is the most expensive part, and two pennyworth lasts many kites, for they are very frail affairs, and in that land of trees do not long escape being caught, though they fly beautifully. Miss J—— had a cockatoo which amused her and the little girls during sewing-class. He was a beautiful bird with a rosy crest, but extremely mischievous. To sharpen his beak he notched all the Venetian shutters in the verandahs; and if he spied a looking-glass, flew at it in a rage and ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... some Titanic graveyard. And now, as he paused in admiration to gaze on the lovely view spread out before him, he felt the burning heat relieved for a moment by a flying cloud; he looked upward—it was a flight of the yellow-crested cockatoo, which passed rapidly on with deafening screeches. A while after, and a flock of the all-coloured parakeet sped past him like the winged fragments of a rainbow. Look where he would, all was beautiful: the sky above, a pure Italian ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson |
