Octopus Quotes

On 'Chopped,' the time goes down a bit and there are several ingredients, usually one that makes no sense whatsoever with the rest of the ingredients. So it gets you out of your culinary comfort zone a little bit. Like we had octopus and cheese paired up with each other. ~ Michael Symon

Octopus can fish for prey while deciding what color and pattern to turn, what shape to make their bodies, be on alert for predators and aware how far away their dens are. ~ Sy Montgomery

Getting all your addictions under control is like trying to put an octopus to bed ~ Anne Lamott

What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle. ~ Haruki Murakami

Though many of the poor have come to see the affluent middle class as its enemy, that class actually stands between the poor and the real powers in this society - the administrative octopus with its head in Washington, the conglomerates, the military complex. ~ Cesar Chavez

Taking a couple short backup swigs, Flint's crippling headache started to release its grip, sort of the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball. ~ Cole Alpaugh

Just as an octopus may have his den in some ocean cave, and come floating out a silent image of horror to attack a swimmer, so I picture such a spirit lurking in the dark of the house which he curses by his presence, and ready to float out upon all whom he can injure. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

They don't want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we're the same. They know what it's like to have an itch. They can imagine what it's like to be a mother. This brief encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus. They ~ Sy Montgomery

At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly. ~ Mark Haddon

The first time I had a baked potato, I was eight years old at a friend's house. Most white kids growing up have a baked potato every day. I didn't even know what to do with it, how to open it. I was the only white kid in high school eating octopus. ~ Scott Fujita

In matters of potential suffering, a single 200,000 years old human being stood against a 550 million years old octopus - acutely aware of its suffering, yet unable to do much to alleviate its misery - is the structural equivalent of comparing the convoluted majesty of the International Space Station to a child's paper and stick kite, and to then stand the octopus against the far more ancient 1.5 billion years old protozoa is to weigh the complexity of the kite to a dust mote caught up in a lazy afternoon breeze. ~ John Zande

We split from our common ancestor with the octopus half a billion years ago. And yet, you can make friends with an octopus. ~ Sy Montgomery

opponent was half pillbug, half octopus, and all butt ugly. I closed ~ Richard Roberts

Talking to that fool is like trying to put socks on an octopus! ~ James Agee

Rock music sounds like an octopus making love to a bagpipe. ~ Brother Dave Gardner

The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses ... This little coterie ... runs our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen ... seizes ... our executive officers ... legislative bodies ... schools ... courts ... newspapers and every agency created for the public protection. ~ John Francis Hylan

I knew more about produce from the sea than any of my schoolmates, and my reports in school, from kindergarten on, amused and shocked my classmates and teachers. I told them how we ate with chopsticks, had rice and seaweed for breakfast, raw fish, octopus, and sea urchin eggs for supper, and cakes made from sharks. ~ Eugenie Clark

She exuded sexuality almost tangible, like ink obscuring the waters around the octopus before it strikes. ~ Travis Luedke

[T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. ~ Roland Barthes

The thing is, my father has about as much rhythm as a drunken octopus […] ~ Mark Peter Hughes

Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers ~ John Steinbeck

But until this night, she had never once actually wet the bed. And now that she has, we just lie there in the accident, and the minutes of the clock keep changing, and the love I have for her keeps growing, and we both keep drawing breath.
What was so horrible about it? Why had I always been so angry? What was my need to always be right? To win every argument with her? To out-stubborn a dog?
And just like that, all the anger is gone. Released like the emptying of a bladder into soft cotton sheets as we lie in the wetness. ~ Steven Rowley

Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts. ~ Charles Fort

It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus; All year long the grasshopper kept burying acorns for winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. Then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns and also he got a race car. Is any of this getting through to you? ~ Billy West

Antonio Sanchez is from Mexico City. I met him at a Pat Metheny concert. He did a solo, and I thought, 'This is an octopus man!' ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I got to try the bagpipes. It was like trying to blow an octopus. ~ James Galway

Exaggeration is the octopus of the English language ~ Matthew Pearl

Ascott scrambled for his dive knife, he and waved the four- inch blade between himself and the octopus. The floating sack of tentacles hesitated and then all eight of its arms snapped forward. Curled in the tip of each was a variety of sharpened implements, from swords and dive knives to a fishing spear. The large unblinking eyes seemed to be saying, Your move. ~ Paul Mannering

American capitalism replaced some of the old colonial capitalisms in the countries that began their independent life. But it knows that this is transitory and that there is no real security for its financial speculation in these new territories. The octopus cannot there apply its suckers firmly. The claw of the imperial eagle is trimmed. Colonialism is dead or is dying a natural death in all these places. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara

The octopuses seemed to be neither friends nor enemies, but in a state of complicated coexistence. ~ Peter Godfrey-Smith

And don't get me started on your hands roaming everywhere. You're like an octopus. Honestly, I feel violated. ~ A&E Kirk

In the cab going downtown, Doug believed he now understood the sensations felt by a person slowly sinking into the grasp of an octopus. Play dead, he told himself. But how? ~ Donald E. Westlake

Everything is octopusied. ~ Wendy Williams

Teaching without talent, compassion and endurance is like an octopus on skates - there will be movement without direction. ~ Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink ... ~ William S. Burroughs

I don't understand how my life got so empty, or why the octopus came, or why everyone eventually goes away. ~ Steven Rowley

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. ~ Arundhati Roy

The way Emily describes it: when I meet someone I love, I become an octopus and wind my tentacles around their heart, tighter and tighter until they can't deny they love me just the same. ~ Christina Lauren

If the plural of "octopus" is "octopi" then why isn't the plural of "rabbit" "rabbi"? Is it just because "octopuses" is too much fun to say? * ~ Jenny Lawson

His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without. ~ Marcel Proust

I waved back and went in, and began to sort my way through ancient building plans that had been rolled up so long that straightening them out was like six bouts with an octopus. ~ Dick Francis

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture - the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard. ~ Oliver Sacks

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me. ~ N. Scott Momaday

It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

He said he'd teach her the important things, starting with the most important thing of all, the correct way to make tea and rice, so tea wasn't overbrewed and the rice wasn't overcooked. He said: You want to make food forget Indian way. Indian's system is like American system, everything overdone. They have no subtle. He sent her to buy octopus. She brought the tentacles home in a bag of ice and cut them into thin slices, at a sharp angle. She put the sliced octopus in a saucepan with ginger and green onions and added a black bean paste. He told her to touch the octopus to the flame and serve. But she let the dish cook for a good five minutes until the flesh was tough and rubbery. You overdid, he told her. Old Chinese saying, you don't need take off your pant to fart. ~ Jeet Thayil

I wish I was Dumbo the Octopus. Adapted to freezing deep-ocean temperatures, I'd flop around down there at
peace. The big concerns of my life would be what sort of bottom-coating slime to feed off of - that's not so different from now - plus I wouldn't have
any natural predators; then again, I don't have any now, and that hasn't done me a whole lot of good. But it suddenly makes sense: I'd like to be
under the sea, as an octopus. ~ Ned Vizzini

An octopus has eight legs. You know what else has eight legs? My bed last night. Oh, I didn't have a foursome, but I did sleep with six prosthetic legs (I have a bad back). ~ Jarod Kintz

When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it's an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi, ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco's purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it's nearly full.
Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you'd use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two.
The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven't gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful. ~ Matthew Amster-Burton

The enemy is typically depicted as a dangerous octopus, a vicious dragon, a multiheaded hydra, a giant venomous tarantula, or an engulfing Leviathan. Other frequently used symbols include vicious predatory felines or birds, monstrous sharks, and ominous snakes, particularly vipers and boa constrictors. Scenes depicting strangulation or crushing, ominous whirlpools, and treacherous quicksands also abound in pictures from the time of wars, revolutions, and political crises. The juxtaposition of paintings from non-ordinary states of consciousness that depict perinatal experiences with the historical pictorial documentation collected by Lloyd de Mause and Sam Keen offer strong evidence for the perinatal roots of human violence. ~ Stanislav Grof

Beware as you get the octopus on board. Suddenly he relaxes his grasp, and shhots out a jet of ink, which smarts considerably. ~ Wilfred Grenfell

The sun
shines in a bucket of water
and doesn't
get wet. ~ Brian Taylor

The address given to me by Greta was written in such a way that the words looked like numbers, and the numbers looked like the aftermath of a startled octopus meeting a deep-sea diver in a corner café. It was the worst writing I had ever seen. ~ Shoeburn Ruffet

A Complete List of Lily's Nicknames
Silly
Little
Lil
Monkey
Bunny
Bunny Rebbit
Mousse
Tiny Mouse
Goose
Silly Goose
Mongoose
Monster
Monster.com
Peanut
Penuche
Pinochle
Sweet Pea
Walnut
Walnut Brian
Copper Bottom
Crazy
Baby
Puppy
Guppy
Old Lady
Crank
Cranky
Cranky Pants
Squeaky
Squeaky Frome
Tiger
Dingbat
Mush
Mushy Face
Hipster
Slinkster
Slinky
Bean
Dog ~ Steven Rowley

I am a monster beneath him, with arching hips, an octopus with hands everywhere at once. I don't think anything in the history of time has felt this good. ~ Christina Lauren

Yes, and this is mine. (Baldrick produces a single scruffy piece of paper.)
My magnificent octopus. ~ Richard Curtis

We get in the car, and someone signals their blinker for my parking spot but I emphatically wave them away like they're after my soul and not just my parking spot. And so we sit there for twelve minutes until the meter runs out. Lily silently crawls from the passenger seat into my lap and curls up into a little ball. She lets out an enormous sigh. ~ Steven Rowley

He let his eyes flitter over her. "I don't see anything 'precisely.' I can tell you're slender. I can see you're wearing white, or some light color. Your face is pale, your lips are reddish. And there appears to be a dark brown octopus attacking your head."

"That's my hair."

Ransom shrugged. "You asked what I see. I see tentacles. ~ Tessa Dare

An octopus was born to hug. ~ Anthony T. Hincks.

Now, I don't know if you can appreciate this without actually knowing her, but getting Mrs. Stricker to laugh is like getting an octopus to stand up on two legs. ~ James Patterson

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit. ~ Cory Doctorow

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

I heard one story about an octopus in a home tank who would get out, cruise around the house, take knick-knacks, and drag them back to its tank. Like a dog! They're so smart that there are octopus enrichment handbooks so you don't bore your octopus. I've seen them play with Legos, Mr. Potato Head, you name it! ~ Sy Montgomery

The tentacles of today reach out like an octopus to swallow yesterday. ~ Gladys Taber

Bruce head butted Hades in the center of his back.

"Is he tasting me?" he asked when Bruce's tail snapped his thigh.

"No. What would give you that idea?" I smiled, slapping at Bruce's head when he opened his massive jaws to take a bite out of Hades' delectable ass.

That was my ass, thank you very much.

"Go find your own ass, Bruce. Now go." I flicked my wrist at him.

His look was grumpy, but Bruce always wore a grumpy look. He took an angry swipe at a passing red horned devil octopus, slurping it down in one mighty gulp.

I grimaced. Okay, so maybe he had been tasting Hades. ~ Jovee Winters

I've traveled all over. I've been to all 50 states. With my dad in the Navy, I lived in the Philippines from nine to 12, and I had dog, monkey, lizard, everything. Then I was in Hawaii, and I'm spear-fishing, catching octopus with my hands. ~ Graham Elliot

This was the southern sea. The colors that fade when coral is drawn out of its element were garishly bright here, intricate and lovely labyrinths on the bottom. Among the coral, fish went darting; and overhead a sea-bat, a devil-fish, flapped slow wings past, its stingaree tail trailing. Morays coiled by, opening their incredible, wolfish mouths at him, and many-limbed crabs scuttled sidewise over the rocks and little sandy plateaus of the bottom. Groves of seaweed and great fans of colored sponges swung with hypnotic motion, and schools of tiny striped fish went flashing in and out among them, moving all together as if with a single mind.

Pete swam down. From a cavern among the brown and purple rocks an octopus looked at him out of huge, alien eyes. Its tentacles hung and quivered. Pete swam away, hovering over an expanse of pale sand where the light from above shimmered and ran in rippling waves, his own shadow hanging spread-eagled below him. In and out of it many little creatures went scuttling busily on their underwater errands. Life here was painted in three dimensions, and there was no gravity. There was only beauty and strangeness and a hint of terror that sent pleasurable excitement thrilling through Pete's blood.

("Before I Wake") ~ Henry Kuttner

He is a messenger from Slothrop's innocent, pre-octopus past. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Perhaps the highlight was Natalie on top of the table, doing some kind of dance that made her look like an octopus. ~ Kiera Cass

Thrilled, I leap on him like an octopus, clinging to him with arms and legs. So more like a quadropus. Does that even exist? ~ Amanda Bouchet

If my life were a corny horror movie, and the heroine was lost and alone, trapped in an underwater cave, what would happen next? If you guessed, "She drops her flashlight, and it hits a rock and breaks, leaving her in utter darkness," you would be right. But I bet you didn't guess the part about an attack by a giant octopus. ~ James Patterson

This was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep without turning on the light. I was awakened by the feeling that the octopus was there. Groping in the dark, I barely managed to turn on the light. My pocket watch showed two o'clock in the morning. I was falling ill when I went to bed, and I woke up sick. It suddenly seemed to me that the autumn darkness would push through the glass and pour into the room, and I would drown in it as in ink. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

I got hit with an octopus in Detroit one time. It was the most gross thing I've ever had happen. I got it right in the back of the neck; all the juice was coming down. It was awful. ~ Pat Burns

Oh, I love hugging. I wish I was an octopus, so I could hug 10 people at a time! ~ Drew Barrymore

But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live. ~ Marcel Proust

Okay.' I can feel the letters vomit off my tongue.
O.
K.
A.
Y.
I watch the vet insert the syringe into the catheter and inject the second drug. And then the adventures come flooding back:

The puppy farm.
The gentle untying of the shoelace.
THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW!
Our first night together.
Running on the beach.
Sadie and Sophie and Sophie Dee.
Shared ice-cream cones.
Thanksgivings.
Tofurky.
Car rides.
Laughter.
Eye rain.
Chicken and rice.
Paralysis.
Surgery.
Christmases.
Walks.
Dog parks.
Squirrel chasing.
Naps.
Snuggling.
'Fishful Thinking.'
The adventure at sea.
Gentle kisses.
Manic kisses.
More eye rain.
So much eye rain.
Red ball.

The veterinarian holds a stethoscope up to Lily's chest, listening for her heartbeat.
All dogs go to heaven.
'Your mother's name is Witchie-Poo.' I stroke Lily behind her ears the way that used to calm her. 'Look for her.'
OH FUCK IT HURTS.
I barely whisper. 'She will take care of you. ~ Steven Rowley

Friends come and go like the waves of the ocean but the true ones stay, like an octopus on your face ~ Anonymous

Aithinne smiles. "You know," she says thoughtfully, "your hair rather looks like an octopus." Then, as if to reassure me: "I love octopi."

And Aithinne is obviously a bit barmy, but nobody's perfect. ~ Elizabeth May

Today's woman must be a prostitute in the kitchen, a ghost in the bedroom, a sniper on the parapet, an octopus at sea world. ~ Rob Thompson

I Know you are asking: What if I am wrong?
What if RAGNAROK does not come? What if it does not happen the way I say it is going to happen?
I suppose that is a possibility.
Perhaps the Mayans WERE wrong.
Maybe we WILL enter a new era of consciousness.
Maybe we will NOT destroy ourselves with technology.
Perhaps it will be that some new old god comes. Say his name is DOZGOTH, the 701st, and say he takes pity on us. And a thousand years after all the suffering of RAGNOROK, he will retcon us back to the very day this book was pusblished.
You will remember nothing of what happened or what you did to survive. The only evidence that any of this ever happened will be this book, and the fact that ou now have a tentacle instead of an arm. But you will explain that away simply by saying you are wearing an octopus sleeve. The mind can explain so many things when it wants to close its eyes and sleep.
Perhaps only one person will remember what really happened, and he will be named Jonathan Coulton. But he cannot tell anyone, for he is but an animal. ~ John Hodgman

What about television?" a young man asked.

"It's an octopus. It's no longer just a little box, it's the Love Machine."

"Why the Love Machine?" a reporter asked.

"Because it sells love. It creates love. Presidents are chosen by their appeal on that little box. It's turned politicians into movie stars and movie stars into politicians. It can you engaged if you use a certain mouthwash. It claims you'll have women hanging on your coattails if you use a certain hair cream. It tells the kids to eat their cereal if they want to be like their baseball idol. But like all great lovers, the Love Machine is a fickle bastard. It has great magnetism--but it has no heart. In place of a heart beats a Nielsen rating. And when the Nielsen falters, the program dies. It's the pulse and heart of the twentieth century--The Love Machine. ~ Jacqueline Susann

If guilt was an animal then it would be an octopus. All slimy and wriggly with hundreds of arms that wrap around your insides and squeeze them tight. ~ Annabel Pitcher

I am an octopus on four wheels. What are my four free arms for? To better love you, of course. ~ Jarod Kintz

The multitude was a frothing octopus, pulsating anthropomorphically over the church steps. ~ Ondjaki

If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are: they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that. ~ Mike DeGruy

It was an octopus with one eye. A Cyclops octopus. I'd call it a cyclopoctopus until a better name came along. ~ Lisa Shearin

It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea. ~ Terence McKenna

Being friends with an octopus-whatever that friendship meant to her-has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom ~ Sy Montgomery

He had electric blue hair that had stuck around his head like tendrils of a startled octopus. ~ Cassandra Clare

With the exception of octopus, I don't think I've met any food that I didn't like. And by the way, sometimes I do like octopus. I'm just not crazy about it by itself. I love sea urchin. I love uni. If I'm going to die of anything, it's going to be gluttony. ~ Justin Timberlake

To know Seattle one must know its waterfront. It is a good waterfront, not as busy as New York's, not as self-consciously colorful as San Francisco's, not as exotic as New Orleans, but a good, honest, working waterfront with big gray warehouses and trim fishing boats and docks that smell of creosote, and sea gulls and tugs and seafood restaurants and beer joints and fish stores--a waterfront where you can hear foreign languages and buy shrunken heads and genuine stuffed mermaids, where you can watch the seamen follow the streetwalkers and the shore patrol follow the sailors, where you can stand at an open-air bar and drink clam nectar, or sit on a deadhead and watch the water, or go to an aquarium and look at an octopus. ~ Murray Morgan

I must accept my Father's loving help in resisting and overcoming. Sin is like an octopus with many tentacles trying to crush out my life. Seldom do all tentacles loosen their hold on me at once. It is one tentacle at a time. In this war against sin, it is a victory won through one soldier dying at a time. Seldom does the entire enemy army fall dead at a single blast. It is hand-to-hand combat. It is one small victory at a time. But God doesn't send me out to do battle without a war plan. He is my Commander; I will fight - inch by inch, hour by hour - under His direction. He dispatches the Holy Spirit to me, with clear directions on how to fight, when to run, where to strike next. This battle against principalities and powers is His ~ David Wilkerson

And since October is coming to an end, what better time to draw Octo-Bear, the bear that is an octopus! ~ Dan Bergstein

Here is a precious message for the New Year from the old year: Be an octopus in the New Year and hold the life tightly with six arms! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn't know. "Did you see the octopus?" Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY? ~ Barry Lopez

at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octopus. The security officer followed the wet slime trail and replaced the octopus in the exhibit it had come from. But here's the shocking part: The aquarium didn't know it had a red octopus living in its Shale Reef exhibit. Apparently the octopus hitchhiked there as a juvenile, attached to a rock or sponge added to the exhibit, and grew up at the aquarium without anyone knowing it was there. ~ Sy Montgomery

We grew to our present size almost against ourselves. It was not a deliberately planned commercial venture in the sense that I sat down and said that we were going to make ourselves into a huge financial octopus. We evolved by necessity. We did not sit down and say to ourselves, 'How can we make a big pile of dough?' It just happened. ~ Walt Disney

Right now I'd love to be sitting on a Greek island somewhere because of being Greek American, eating great octopus salad and some fantastic lamb. Or sipping a little ouzo. I think the Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest ... Lots of nuts, vegetables, fruits, fresh fish, lean meats, yogurt. ~ Cat Cora

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing? ~ Thomas Pynchon

I smile to myself. I have a secret: I wish I was Dumbo the Octopus. ~ Ned Vizzini