"Constrictor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be terrible and deadly' The eye of the boa-constrictor, while fascinating its prey, is lovely. No royal crown holds such a jewel; it is a ruby with the emerald's green light playing ever upon it. Yet the deer that sees it loses all power of motion, and trembles, and awaits his death and even so, to compare hearing with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... cannot understand this swift forward motion of serpents. The seizure of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite simple in mechanism; it is simply the return to its coil of an opened watch-spring, and is just as instantaneous. But the steady and continuous motion, without a visible fulcrum (for the whole ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... horrible fate. Their implacable enemy had wound his coils around their town, the fatal digue, thrown up with labour, incredible and impossible to all but hate, prevented any succours reaching them; there it lay, circling their port like a huge constrictor waiting patiently for its exhausted prey,—there was no remedy, and the chief persons of the town repaired in a body to Guiton to represent the state of the inhabitants and to propose a surrender. They bade him look around on the famishing wretches who lay about the streets; ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... long from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, and exactly eight feet four inches long from the tip of his tail to the end of his nose. Neither did he impart knowledge, like another of his craft, and tell people that the boa-constrictor was so-called because he constructed such pleasing images with his serpentine form. But he did inform them that the monstrous reptile he possessed—one which, by the way, was only nine feet long—was always furnished in the cold weather with ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... sudden, Sara made a discovery that stopped her heart in a breath. In a country where the butterflies were as big as peacocks, the caterpillars were as big as boa-constrictors! Sara didn't know the exact size of a boa-constrictor, having met them only in her Geography: but surely they couldn't be any bigger than these! Certainly they were big enough to swallow her as easily as the big black snake Jimmy had killed swallowed ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... precise information as to the fauna of the American continent, then you had come to the right shop. Where and why the bison "wallowed"; how beaver were to be trapped and wild turkeys stalked; the grizzly and how to handle him, and the pretty pressing ways of the constrictor,—in fine, the haunts and the habits of all that burrowed, strutted, roared, or wriggled between the Atlantic and the Pacific,—all this knowledge I took for my province. By the others my equipment was fully recognized. Supposing a book ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... negroes, monkeys and alligators. There was one in particular, about a whole boat's crew sitting down on what they thought was a fallen tree, but which suddenly swept them all over on their faces, and turned out to be a boa-constrictor, and would have embraced one of them if he had not had the sail of the boat coiled round the mast, and palmed off upon him, when he gorged it contentedly, and being found dead on the next landing, his skin was used to cover the captain's sea-chest. Clarence declined ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... partially hidden from my sight, was the grand tank containing the great white whale, which has created such a furore in our sightseeing midst for the past few weeks. Upon the floor were caged the boa-constrictor, anacondas and rattlesnakes, whose heads would now and then rise menacingly through the top of the cage. In the extreme right was the cage, entirely shut from my view at first, containing the Bengal tiger and the Polar bear, whose terrific growls could be distinctly ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... have fallen headlong with fear and exhaustion upon the turf, had not a gentle female caught the slender youth in her arms, and embraced him with all the energetic affection of a boa-constrictor. ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... the road. If there's a more solid road in the country, Ben, than the South Midland, I've got to hear of it. It's big, but it's growing—swallowing up everything that comes in its way, like a regular boa constrictor. Think what it was when I came into it immediately after the war; and to-day it's one of the few roads that is steadily increasing its earnings in spite of ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... indifferent names may be, we can scarcely admit the idea, that the hemisphere in which Virgil described the agonies of Laocoon (a fable which the Greeks of Asia borrowed from much more southern nations) does not possess the boa-constrictor. I will not augment the confusion of zoological nomenclature by proposing new changes, and shall confine myself to observing that at least the missionaries and the latinized Indians of the missions, if ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... dress suits on Third Avenue—it all goes together. Heavens," she sighed, breaking off abruptly, "have we built up a Frankenstein monster? Is that dress suit of yours going to prove as voracious as the fabled boa constrictor?" ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... freckled Like the bald head Of a jaundiced Jewish banker. Her fair and featurous face Writhed like An albino boa-constrictor. She thought she resembled the Mona Lisa. This demonstrates ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... strange and sinister quality. One instant it lies passive, or slowly whirled in a careless circle—the next its noose darts out like the head of a striking cobra, the coil falls and fastens, and then it draws tighter and tighter, remorselessly as a boa constrictor, ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... esculentus) would gladden the heart of a gorilla. Every larger palm-trunk was a fernery; every dead bole was an orchidry; and huge fungi, two feet broad, fed upon the remains of their victims. Climbers, chiefly papilionaceous, and llianas, bigger than the biggest boa-constrictor, coiled and writhed round the great gloomy trees which rained their darkness below. In the sunlight were pretty jasmines (J. grande), crotons and lantanas, with marantas, whose broad green leafage was lined with pink and purple. Deep in shadow lay black miry sloughs of sickening odour, near ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Jean Jacques will wind the boa-constrictor round his neck like a collar, all for love of those he has lost," answered the Judge with emotion; and he caught M. Fille's arm in the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... completed the last meshes of the net-work in which he now held the whole arrondissement of Ville-aux-Fayes. To avoid too many explanations it is necessary to state, once for all, succinctly, the genealogical ramifications by means of which Gaubertin wound himself about the country, as a boa-constrictor winds around a tree,—with such art that a passing traveller thinks he beholds some natural effect ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... have surmised that serpents have no sense of taste, because the boa-constrictor in the Zoological Gardens swallowed his blanket. Chemistry may, however, assist us in solving the mystery, and induce us to draw quite an opposite conclusion from the curious circumstance alluded to. May not the mistake of the serpent be attributed to the marvellous acuteness of his taste? ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... no ultimate value whatsoever; that an Oriental dance and pantomime given in New York by "society" women, led by Mrs. Waldorf Astor, where a rich young woman reaped astonishment and admiration by coiling a live boa constrictor around her neck, was one of the great events of the day, because the newspapers devoted two columns to it, whereas scarcely any mention was made of armies of men being ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... are there snakes?" said Dick, apostrophising the sea. "Why the last time as ever I was there, they caught a boa-constrictor as was—" ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... not a boa-constrictor, and even a boa-constrictor has an end. Hunger satisfied, his next strongest feeling, simple vanity, remained to be contented. As the last morsel went in ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... patients that favored me with it, made me disbelieve my other senses; but Miss Lusignan is now about the thirtieth who has shown me that marvellous feat, with a calm countenance that belies the herculean effort. Nature has her every-day miracles: a boa-constrictor, diameter seventeen inches, can swallow a buffalo; a woman, with her stays bisecting her almost, and lacerating her skin, can yet for one moment make herself seem slack, to deceive a juvenile physician. The snake is the miracle of expansion; the woman is ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... gust upon the river, From the sudden earthquake shiver, From the trip of mule or donkey, From the midnight howling monkey, From the stroke of knife or dagger, From the puma and the jaguar, From the horrid boa-constrictor That has scared us in the pictur', From the Indians of the Pampas Who would dine upon their grampas, From every beast and vermin That to think of sets us squirmin', From every snake that tries on ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... solar rays.... Hunger and thirst are strong terms, and the things themselves are too feverish provocations for civilized man. They are incompatible with the sense of taste in its epicureanism, and their gratification is of a very bodily order. The savage man, like a boa-constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, if his gullet would let him. This is to cheat the taste with unmanageable objects, as though we should give an estate to a child. On the other hand, civilization, house-building, warm apartments and kitchen fires, well-stored larders, and especially exemption ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... The boa-constrictor—sawar, as the Malays called it—lived in the jungle and rice-swamps. Sometimes it attained an enormous size. An Englishman told me that he and some Malays were exploring the jungle to find traces of antimony ore, and came to an opening in the ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... that each tree formed a grove of its own, we recognized as banyan trees. In one part of the garden, winding paths led through a tangled tropical growth so dense and wild that one felt as if in the midst of an African jungle where a tiger might spring forth or a boa constrictor drop down ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... been there to watch it, because after all, what I saw, was only the dead record of something that had been very much alive and vociferatingly noisy. And in another place it had reared and raised its head like a boa constrictor, ready to strike at its prey; up to the flashing, forked tongue it was there. But one spot I remember, where it looked exactly as if quite consciously it had attempted the outright ludicrous: it had thrown up the snow into the ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... always felt that the imagination, what is called, for want of a better term, the "creative faculty," was there, but it was lethargic; it sometimes roused itself to spurts and flashes during wakeful nights, but slept like a boa-constrictor that had swallowed a pig when he tried to invoke it. No doubt, as Gora had told him, his life had been too easy and agreeable; he made a good deal of money with no particular effort, he was a favorite with the cleverest men and ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton |
