"Cocoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stowed away, Limberleg climbed farther up the tree to find a place for Firetop. But he had already found one for himself and was beginning to make his bed. When he was swung from his branches like a big cocoon, Hawk-Eye and Limberleg made themselves as comfortable as they could on the lower limbs of the tree. The western sky was all aflame with yellow and red, as they settled themselves for the night, and the birds ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... according to Taoist lore, is a solitary man of the mountains. He appears to die, but does not. After 'death' his body retains all the qualities of the living. The body or corpse is for him only a means of transition, a phase of metamorphosis—a cocoon or chrysalis, the temporary ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... naturally the most vicious inclinations. It is most salutary. Even I am but a worm, Miss Hugonin, though the press has been pleased to speak most kindly of me. Even you—ah, no!" cried Mr. Jukesbury, kissing his finger-tips, with gallantry; "let us say a worm who has burst its cocoon and become a butterfly—a butterfly with a charming face and a most charitable ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... fully extended, gray and striped, leathery in appearance, very closely resembling the back of the tree upon which they rest when not feeding. Having attained its full growth as a caterpillar, it ties together two or three leaves with strands of silk, thus making a loose cocoon within which it pupates. The pupa is dark brown, covered with a whitish or bluish-white bloom. In about one month the moths emerge. They are large in size, the body being one to one and one-fourth inches long and the expanded wings two and ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... around her a nimbus of sound, like that made by the light issuing from the blessed ones, as beheld by Dante, which revealed their presence but hid them in its radiance, as the moth is hid in the silk of its cocoon. Richard felt entirely well. The warmth entered into him, and met the warmth generated in him. All was peace and hope and bliss, quaintest mingling of expectation and fruition. Even Arthur Lestrange ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... incredible to themselves; for they are unwound like a cocoon, and know not which way the ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... piece of counsel. You sit too close to your books. You read and read,—you spin yourself into your own views like a cocoon. Travel—hear what others say—above all, go into retreat! No one need know. It would ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... serenely issues his thoughts, in the form of orders; which are found correct to pattern. This is the process with his Majesty. A poor Majesty, taking deeply into tobacco; this is the way they have him benetted, as in a dark cocoon of cobwebs, rendering the whole world invisible to him. Which cunning arrangement is more and more perfected every year; so that on all roads he travels, be it to mass, to hunt, to dinner, any-whither in his ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... licked and fed, and carried to a place of safety in time of danger. The larvae are ingeniously sorted as regards age and size, and are never mixed. The larvae period generally extends through a month, although often much longer, and in most species when the larvae pass into pupae they spin a cocoon of white or straw color, looking much like a shining pebble. Other larvae do not spin a cocoon, but spend the pupal state naked. When they mature they are carefully assisted from their shells by ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... hurled herself into a corner. Her body activated a pressure plant and a pair of mummy-like plastifoam plates slid curvingly out the wall and locked her in a soft cocoon. A dozen similar safety clamps were located throughout the car at every working ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... [U.S.], schoolboy, hobbledehoy, hopeful, cadet, minor, master. scion; sap, seedling; tendril, olive branch, nestling, chicken, larva, chrysalis, tadpole, whelp, cub, pullet, fry, callow; codlin, codling; foetus, calf, colt, pup, foal, kitten; lamb, lambkin^; aurelia^, caterpillar, cocoon, nymph, nympha^, orphan, pupa, staddle^. girl; lass, lassie; wench, miss, damsel, demoiselle; maid, maiden; virgin; hoyden. Adj. infantine^, infantile; puerile; boyish, girlish, childish, babyish, kittenish; baby; newborn, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... her grow fast, and in five days she is so large as to nearly fill the cell. Then she stops eating, spins a cocoon, and lies in it for about two and a half days more. When she comes out of this, she is called a Pupa. Sixteen days after the laying of the egg, the young Queen is ready to come out of her cell. It takes twenty-one days for a Worker to become fully grown and twenty-five for ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... concerning which so many words are expended. The growth of the germinal idea depends on the nature of an author's talent—he may excel in expansion, or in reduction; he may be economical, and out of an anecdote may spin the whole cocoon of a romance; or he may be extravagant, and give a capable idea away in the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the bird, so strangely gay, Fluttering, fluttering, ghostly and gray, A vague, unravelling, final tune, Like a long unwinding silk cocoon; Sang as though for the soul of him Who ironed away in that bower dim:— "I have forgotten Your dragons great, Merry and mad and friendly and bold. Dim is your proud lost palace-gate. I vaguely know There were heroes of old, Troubles more than the heart could hold, There ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... even though he be in hell. "Pray deliver me," said a sinner to Sang Tsung (So-san).[FN261] "Who ties you up?" was the reply. You tie yourself up day and night with the fine thread of idle thoughts, and build a cocoon of environment from which you have no way of escape. 'There is no rope, yet you imagine yourself bound.' Who could put fetters on your mind but your mind itself? Who could chain your will but your own will? Who could blind your spiritual eyes, unless you yourself shut them up? Who ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... of her limbs, fell to observing the people about her. The woman in front of her leaned against the pew and brought her broad, well-fed back close under Sylvia's eyes. It was covered with as many layers as a worm in a cocoon. There were beads on lace, the lace incrusted on other lace, chiffon, fish-net, a dimly seen filmy satin, cut in points, and, lower down, an invisible foundation of taffeta. Through the interstices there gleamed a revelation of the back ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... tossing with fever in the city, when with a violent wrench I found myself borne off from my sheltered and dusky resting-place, and tossed into a boat in the blinding glare of the sun. Fortunately, I had wrapped myself in some broad grape-vine leaves, and was mistaken for a moth cocoon; else, dear Phil, ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... sitting down, I observed close to us what I took to be a seed-pod of some aerial plant, hanging straight down from a bough, at about six feet from the ground. On going up to it, I found to my surprise that it was a cocoon about the size of a sparrow's egg, woven by a caterpillar in broad meshes of a rose-coloured silky substance. It hung, suspended from the tip of an outstanding leaf, by a strong silken thread about six inches in length. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... laid a large number of eggs in a silken cocoon, in shape a balloon, and secreted, like the web, by her invaluable spinnerets. Indeed, the real reason—I won't say excuse—for the rapacity and Gargantuan appetite of the spider lies, no doubt, in the immense amount of material ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... grubby?" she said. "All his coat-pockets are permanently out of shape. The other day I was looking through them, at his request, to find one of my own handkerchiefs which he had taken, and oh, horrors! a caterpillar, forgotten, had spun a big cocoon ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... pack for herself—for so different a journey!—had to be emptied of its feminine possessions, and David's little belongings stowed in their place. David himself had views about this packing; he kept bringing one thing or another—his rubber boots, a cocoon, a large lump of slag honeycombed with air- holes; would she please put them into ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... museums. A lifeless moth fades rapidly under the most favourable conditions. A moth at eight days of age, in the last stages of decline, is from four to six distinct shades lighter in colour than at six hours from the cocoon, when it is dry, and ready for flight. As soon as circulation stops, and the life juices evaporate from the wings and body, the colour grows many shades paler. If exposed to light, moths soon ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... sweet dreams! Ah, stir not to depart! Kiss me again, thy Wife and Virgin too! O Love, that, like a rose, Deckest my breast with beautiful repose, Kiss me again, and clasp me round the heart, Till fill'd with thee am I As the cocoon is with the butterfly! —Yet how 'scape quite Nor pluck pure pleasure with profane delight? How know I that my Love is what he seems! Give me a sign That, in the pitchy night, Comes to my pillow an immortal Spouse, And not a fiend, hiding with happy boughs Of palm and asphodel The pits of hell!' ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a singer she'll wear silk as habitually as a cocoon. She will have to take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. We shall know her hereafter as La Sanguinelli; and when she comes to Boston we shall make our modest brags about going out to Europe with her. I don't know; I think I preferred the idyllic flavor I was beginning ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... a sound in the House except down the hall a snore—a glorious, triumphant note. A second time the gong took up its discordant march. Then from the cocoon on the bed a flash of legs and arms sprang out and into the waiting garments. There was a splash in the basin that spattered the water far and near, and Butsey, enveloped in a towel, rushed into his upper garments, flung back his hair ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... the female's instincts are often different from the male's); it refers to particular conditions of life that are of vital importance, though they may occur only once in a lifetime. The female Yucca Moth emerges from the cocoon when the Yucca flower puts forth its bell-like blossoms. She flies to a flower, collects some pollen from the stamens, kneads it into a pill-like ball, and stows this away under her chin. She flies to an older Yucca flower and lays her eggs in some of ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... will be affected locally, and immediately by an adverse issue of the great national struggle now going on. But the North will be an utterly dead force in the American nation. She will be rolled up in a corner, like a cocoon waiting for its transmigration. The whole North will become provincial; it will be but a fringe to a nation whose heart will ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... elder, proved his good sense by taking no very special interest in the boy's education. Violence of direction in education falls flat: man is a lonely creature, and has to work out his career in his own way. To help the grub spin its cocoon is quite unnecessary, and to play the part of Mrs. Gamp with the butterfly in its chrysalis stage is to place a quietus upon ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and in each of the necks thus formed a circular disk is fixed, a partition one or two millimetres thick. (.039 to.079 inch.—Translator's Note.) The rooms separated by these partitions form so many little barrels or kegs, each compactly filled with a reddish, transparent cocoon, through which the larva shows, bent into a fish-hook. The whole suggests a string of rough, oval amber beads, touching ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... SILK, and the amount of raw and thrown silk exported is about $57,500,000 annually. Silk culture is carried on all over the kingdom, though the industry flourishes most extensively in Piedmont and Lombardy, in the north. Over 550,000 people are engaged in rearing silkworms, and the annual cocoon harvest approximates 100,000,000 pounds. Silk-"throwing," or-spinning, is the principal manufacturing industry, and the amount of silk spun and exported is about 45,000 tons, most of which goes to France. After silk the products of the country that constitute the principal exports are OLIVE ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... come back to their old earthly billet. But of course these are all mere surmises, and hardly to be regarded seriously. On Thursday I am to be sent to Rondebosch, Tommy's oft and ever-repeated cry, "Roll on, dear old Blighty" (England), seems vainer than ever as time spins out its endless cocoon. ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... of life, the two divide and can be seen separately. Death differs from the conditions of separation before death in that there is a complete break between the two bodies, and life is carried on entirely by the lighter of the two, while the heavier, like a cocoon from which the living occupant has escaped, degenerates and disappears, the world burying the cocoon with much solemnity by taking little pains to ascertain what has become of its nobler contents. It is ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... moment of pride about my poor BLACK ARROW: Dickon Crookback I did, and I do, think is a spirited and possible figure. Shakespeare's - O, if we can call that cocoon Shakespeare! - Shakespeare's is spirited - one likes to see the untaught athlete butting against the adamantine ramparts of human nature, head down, breach up; it reminds us how trivial we are to-day, and what safety resides ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in "barber, bitten, button, balance, banish;—" and many unaccented ones to be "long;" as the last in sofa, specie, noble, metre, sorrow, daisy, valley, nature, native; or the first in around, before, delay, divide, remove, seclude, obey, cocoon, presume, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... way they seem to shed those things, as a worm does its cocoon, after they are here for a while," she answered. "In the light of loving care, the sunny child nature comes out—it cannot help it, any more than a rose can help blooming in the sun; and, with the other children who have ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... Then two powers strive on his brow which his son, confronted by the shield over his father's eyes, does not see. He wants to ask something but he does not ask. So thick is the cloud that the old man has spun about him like a cocoon that there is no longer any way through it from him out into the world nor any, leading from outside in to him. He behaves as if he knew about everything. If he did not do so, he would show the world his helplessness and himself challenge it to abuse this helplessness. And if he should ask would ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... Tit's ways—storing away provisions for a time of need. With his stout, conical beak he is able to break the shell of an acorn, peck a corn grain into swallowable bits, and tear open the toughest casing of a cocoon. He will even break the hard pits of the dogwood berry to secure the kernel within, the ground below often being strewn with the shell fragments. No danger of Parus bicolor coming to want or going to ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... like any type of men and women, we'll have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel like that—like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its wings. Because where do these ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... secretion of the silk-worm, with which it builds its nest or cocoon. This insect was originally brought to Europe from China. Silk, in its chemical nature, is very similar to the hair and wool of animals; whilst in the insect it is a fluid, which is coagulated, apparently by uniting with ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... silk most beautiful in texture and colour, called "Sun Silk." To obtain this silk, the sun is made to bear on silk-worms at particular hours of the day, and the result is, that the silk of the cocoon is of a colour resembling ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... are included the fibrous substances that can be spun into threads, and woven or felted into cloth. Some of these, like the covering of the sheep, goat, and llama, or the cocoon of the silk-worm, are of animal origin; others, like cotton furze, the husk of the cocoanut, and the bast of the flax-plant are vegetable products. Their use in the manufacture of cloth antedates the period at which written history begins; it probably begins with the time when primitive man ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... must perish eternally, he must dare to look on himself as he was: he would not recognize himself, and thought he lay and would lie hid from all. Dante describes certain of the redeemed as lying each concealed in his or her own cocoon of emitted light: James lay hidden like a certain insect in its own gowk-spittle. It is strange, but so it is, that many a man will never yield to see himself until he become aware of the eyes of other men fixed upon ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... about in great consternation when their eggs were suddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under every stone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which they picked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-building spiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball of eggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body. This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about held between her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... to the ground. It was forbidden to any insect to remain on a high stalk of grass, lest he might look down on His Highness. Even the Inch-worm had to wind himself up and stop measuring his length, while the line was passing. And in case of grubs or moths in the nest or cocoon, too young to crawl out, the law compelled their parents to cover them over with a leaf. It would be an insult to Lord Long-legs to look down on him. Next followed two lantern-bearers, holding glow-worms for lanterns in their fore-paws. These were wrapped in cases made of ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... wakens the memory; it will need no instruction, and—unless when it has been taught to look for it during many generations—will expect none. This may be seen in the case of the humming-bird sphinx moth, which, as Mr. Darwin writes, "shortly after its emergence from the cocoon, as shown by the bloom on its unruffled scales, may be seen poised stationary in the air with its long hair-like proboscis uncurled, and inserted into the minute orifices of flowers; AND NO ONE I BELIEVE HAS EVER SEEN this moth ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... any notice of her. She crawled around the iglo and watched the fraudulent wife making love to her husband. It filled her with jealousy and indignation, but she could do nothing to help matters. The season was arriving when she would turn into a cocoon for her long winter's sleep. If something did not happen quickly, her hopes would be blasted forever. Crawling up over the place where her mother was cooking, the caterpillar accidentally fell down ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... is nearly or quite as primitive as the ancient spinning wheels. Thousands of operatives are constantly employed in forming up these threads by hand, adding filament by filament to the thread as required, while watching the unwinding from the cocoon of many miles of filament in order to produce a single pound of the raw silk thread, making up the thread unaided by any mechanical device beyond a simple reel on which the thread is wound as finished, and a basin of heated water in which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... cockchafer is here known only as the oak-web, and a smaller beetle as fern-web. It seems hard to guess why they should be named web (which in Anglo-Saxon means weaver), as they do not, I think, form any cocoon. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... a day that birds like. The ground was soft enough to let the earthworms come up to breathe, so that Robins could catch them easily, and the air was full of all kinds of insects newly out from their long winter sleep in their soft cocoon beds, much to the delight of the ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... this perfection of species, or of phases, could be attained without pain, it were well. Pain comes from lack of wisdom to realize that out of the lower the higher inevitably springs, as the butterfly springs from the cocoon; as the flower springs from the seed; "as above so below" is a translation of an old Sinto saying, which also bids us "trust in Kami ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... baby—oh, the sweet little fellow—the dear little fellow—" hummed Oliver wildly as he made a few last additions to the curious network of string and towels with which he had wound Ted into the fire-escape as if he had been making him a cocoon. "Well—well—well—what a night we're having! What a night we're having and what will we have next?" Then he remembered the reason for his journey and removed a bottle of brandy from the brown cup-board, found appropriate glasses and, in the ice-chest, ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... lines under his feet were smoking, tendrils rising and twisting as the hair of the Foanna rippled and twisted. And the smoke clung, wreathed his body. They moved in a cocoon of smoke, thicker and thicker, until Ross could not even see the Foanna who accompanied him, was only assured of her presence by the hand which ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... preserving and carrying their cocoons as long as possible; and this they could not help doing although the cocoons were empty. According as the one or other instinct was the stronger in each individual ant, so did it carry the empty cocoon to a greater or less distance. If this little observation should ever prove of any use to you, you are quite at liberty to use it. Again thanking you cordially for the great pleasure which your work has given me, I remain with ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Rose Euclid. And then a few more. As the emotion of the scene grew, the proportion of her words audible in the gallery diminished. Until she became, for him, totally inarticulate, raving away there and struggling in a cocoon of hexameters. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... been making sketches of the development of several butterflies. This kind of work he dearly loved. He would spend hours, sometimes, watching a delicate insect emerge from its cocoon and slowly dry its dainty, crumpled wings until it ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... thoughts, and as he reached the foot of School House Hill he caught sight of Hale's sleigh in the distance. He hurried forward to meet it, but as it drew nearer he saw that it was driven by the carpenter's youngest boy and that the figure at his side, looking like a large upright cocoon in spectacles, was that of Mrs. Hale. Ethan signed to them to stop, and Mrs. Hale leaned forward, her pink wrinkles twinkling ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... University, felt a tingle in his blood that day when he met Miss Jeanette Barclay, aged eighteen, and home for the spring vacation from the state university; and seeing her for the first time with her eyes and her hair and her pretty, strong, wide forehead poking through the cocoon of gawky girlhood, created a distinct impression on ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... numerous beautiful examples of insect workmanship. Among others is the work of a caterpillar—a cocoon about the size of a sparrow's egg, woven in broad meshes of either buff or rose-coloured silk, and seen suspended from the tip of an outstanding leaf by a strong thread, five or six inches in length. It forms a conspicuous object hung ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... as a member of the Cabinet I would have an opportunity, say once a month or so, to think upon questions of statecraft and policy, but I find myself locked in a cocoon—no wings and no chance for wings ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane |
