"Starfish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plunges him head-under the advancing wave. Ere he can fetch his breath to scream, down again he goes, and yet again. The frigid, heavy water stings his cowering body; he has swallowed quarts of it; his foot has come in contact with a crab or a starfish; before him rolls the tumultuous expanse of desolation, surging forward to take his life; behind him are the rickety steps of the bathing-machine, which, but now a chamber of torture, has become his sole haven of refuge. Buffeted by the billows, he makes shift ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... blocks, rollicking mushrooms, tipsy toadstools; narrow fjords, sparklingly clear, wind among and intersect the stubborn masses. Fish, bright as butterflies and far more alert, flash in and out of mazes more bewildering than that in which Rosamond's bower was secluded. Starfish stud the sandy flats, a foot in diameter, red with burnished black bosses, and in all shades of red to pink and cream and thence to derogatory grey. Here is a jade-coloured conglomeration of life resembling nothing in the world more than a loose handful of worms without beginning and without end, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... deforestation results as more and more land is being cleared for agriculture and settlement; some damage to coral reefs from starfish and indiscriminate coral and shell collectors; overhunting ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... his starfish attitude, looked across the room and realized instantly that it was all up ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... the reef itself, my tennis shoes keeping the sharp edges from cutting my feet. It was the low tide succeeding sunrise, and the water over the reef was a few inches deep, so that I could see the marine life of the wall, the many kinds of starfish, the sea-urchins, and the curious bivalves which hide with their shell-tips just even with the floor of the lagoon, and, keeping them barely even, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... or wherever stern business keeps one, and to think of the sea. I do not envy the millions at Margate and Blackpool, at Salcombe and Minehead, for I have persuaded myself that the sea is not what it was in my day. Then the pools were always full of starfish; crabs—really big crabs—stalked the deserted sands; and anemones waved their feelers ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... two shoals, one of 14 and the other of 16 feet, both of which break in rough weather, but depths elsewhere on the ground about are from 13 to 20 fathoms. The bottom, both on the shoals and about them, is rocky and has many starfish upon it, except on the north-western part, where the bottom is of sand. Marks: The eastern end of Elmwood Rock on the little high woods of Small Point: the Outer Sister ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... capable of removing portions of their anatomy at will. Eyes, arms—and maybe more. Without batting an eyelash. My knowledge of biology came in handy, at this point. Obviously they were simple beings, uni-cellular, some sort of primitive single-celled things. Beings no more developed than starfish. Starfish can do the same ...
— The Eyes Have It • Philip Kindred Dick
... of all descriptions are found in immense numbers. The five-rayed varieties of starfish are universally condemned as insatiable foes of the oyster family, and the oyster cultivators destroy all they can find. To dismember the body of the starfish by pulling off the finger-like rays does not kill the animal, for not only does each fish produce new rays but ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... doubt the tale I tell, Steer through the South Pacific swell; Go where the branching coral hives Unending strife of endless lives, Where, leagued about the 'wildered boat, The rainbow jellies fill and float; And, lilting where the laver lingers, The starfish trips on all her fingers; Where, 'neath his myriad spines ashock, The sea-egg ripples down the rock; An orange wonder dimly guessed, From darkness where the cuttles rest, Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide The blind white Sea-snake and his bride Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... soldier was changed into a great rough red starfish, who goes about killing the poor mussels, while nobody loves him, or cares to take his part; and the poor little girl was changed into a beautiful bright jelly-fish, like that one, who swims about all day in the pleasant sunshine, with a red cross ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... swim, boy. I can swim like a starfish, but I can't wif ten thousand tons of a subicecream ship on ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... being uplifted or overawed by form, we are rejoiced by color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by the story that color and movement tell. And over all there is the bright, blue, painted sky, studded, almost distractedly studded, with a plethora of the yellow stars the Egyptians made like starfish. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... a leg below, with a claw like a comb at the tip, and a nostril at the root; and in the middle it had no stomach and one eye; and as for its mouth, that was all on one side, as the madreporiform tubercle in a starfish is. Well, it was a very strange beast; but no stranger than some dozens which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a nice way to live?" he asked. "The sea is really wonderful. I have learned more about sea and shore already than you can find in all the books. Do you know where the gulls nest, and how they hatch their young? Did you ever watch a starfish feeding? Do you know what part of the shellfish is the scallop of commerce? Do you know that every seventh wave is almost sure to be larger ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper |
