A garland of quotations XI

Culled from the finest ammonites in literary history, and re-woven every Monday

See giant mollusks! See them fight to the death!…There is no escape from the living hell that time forgot.
•trailer for The Lost Continent (1968).

Do you know all last night I dreamed about octopuses?
•Alice, The Brady Bunch, ”Personality Kid” (1971).

Kyrnos, be flexible in character, always adapting
your own mood to that of the friend you chance to be with;
be as the lithe and tentacled octopus, altering color
so that it matches and loses itself in the rock where it clings.
•Theognis (C6–5 BC).

The many-footed squid dragged his many coils into the hills, and pounced on the hare.
•Nonnos, Dionysiaca (C4).

Who is the Originator?
Octopus Magnus is the Originator.
Octopus Magnus is no accident.
•Gerardus Ramc, Octopus Magnus (2000).

The octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.
•George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

Obviously, an octopus does not know what fire is, or how to escape from it.…This surprising insensitivity to fire has been observed confirmed by Guy Gilpatric, one of the pioneers of diving, who told us that he has seen an octopus, which had been brought onto shore, cross through a fire to get back into the water.
•Jacques Cousteau, Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973).

Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with a Scotch accent.
•James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Catch not the cuttlefish.
•Pythagoras, Maxims (C6 BC).

the octopus s secret wish
is not to be a formal fish
he dreams that some time he may grow
another set of legs or so
and be a broadway music show
•Don Marquis, archy & mehitabel (1927).

References: Theognis: Richard Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics (UChiP, 1995); Nonnos: Dionysiaca (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1995); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.