Cranium Quotes & Sayings

You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus. — Michael Chabon

THE ZERO SUM GAME: I have found that people whose hair is teased do not like brainteasers. By the same token, people who like brainteasers do not have teased hair. It's clear that the human cranium cannot sustain both. — Demetri Martin

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m. — David Sedaris

The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or 'de-minded'. — Istvan Aranyosi

The Squire flew over to Mr Escot. "I told you," said he, "I would settle him: but there is a very hard condition attached to his compliance."
"I submit to it," said Mr Escot, "be it what it may."
"Nothing less," said Squire Headlong, "than the absolute and unconditional surrender of the skull of Cadwallader."
"I resign it," said Mr Escot.
"The skull is yours," said the squire, skipping over to Mr Cranium.
"I am perfectly satisfied," said Mr Cranium.
"The lady is yours," said the squire, skipping back to Mr Escot.
"I am the happiest man alive," said Mr Escot. — Thomas Love Peacock

My Wish
is to fall
cranium over Converse
in dizzy daydream-worthy
love. — Sarah Tregay

I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots "I think, therefore I am," whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait. What avail are good looks? To grab temporary security? What avail are brains? Merely to say "I have seen; I have comprehended? — Sylvia Plath

Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city
in every cranium
in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed. — Michael Chabon

My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected he was whittling at my skull - no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels. — P. Harding

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. — Douglas Coupland

Gross man seldom or never realizes that his body is a kingdom, governed by Emperor Soul on the throne of the cranium, with subsidiary regents in the six spinal centres or spheres of consciousness. This theocracy extends over a throng of obedient subjects: twenty-seven thousand billion cells (endowed with sure if seemingly automatic intelligence by which they perform all duties of bodily growths, transformations, and dissolutions) and fifty million substratal thoughts, emotions, and variations of alternating phases in man's consciousness in an average life of sixty years. Any — Paramahansa Yogananda

I was smart enough to know that I shouldn't tell anyone the reason I needed that icy air. No need to spill the secret that I was the genius of all geniuses, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 1980s. That would just inspire envy and skepticism. So I'd just stare at the closed window and stew. If ten minutes went by without my lungs getting fresh air, I panicked. I needed to make sure the monoxide hadn't eaten my cranium. — A. J. Jacobs

Look for all the world like you're counting the brain cells in his cranium. — Theodore Annemann

If you have no past or no future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots, 'I think, therefore I am,' whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait. — Sylvia Plath

Only a few pages into "The Technologists" and Matthew Pearl already has written a gem about Boston:
"Then would come the view of the stretches of docks and piers ... then beyond that the State House's gold dome capping the horizon - the glittering cranium of the world's smartest city. — Matthew Pearl

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. — Vladimir Nabokov

The librarian, whom I had never seen before, presided over the library like a watchdog, one of those poor dogs who are deliberately made vicious by being chained up and given little to eat; ot better, like the old, toothless cobra, pale because of centuries of darkness, who guards the king's treasure in the Jungle Book. Paglietta, poor woman, was little less than a lusus naturae: she was small, without breasts or hips, waxen, wilted, and monstrously myopic; she wore glasses so thick and concave that, looking at her head-on, her eyes, light blue, almost white, seemed very far away, stuck at the back of her cranium. She gave the impression of never having been young, although she was certainly not more than thirty, and of having been born there, in the shadows, in that vague odor of mildew and stale air. — Primo Levi

When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld. — Charles Lyell

Diagnosed incidentally with stage IV, grade 4 metastatic renal cell carcinoma, I had bone metastases in my femur (which eventually fractured), ulna, and cranium; five metastases in my lungs; and muscle metastases in my thigh and tongue. Yet six months after diagnosis, my treatment ended: I've not had a drop of anything since. — Dave DeBronkart

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. — Stephen Jay Gould

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue.
"Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!"
Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!"
A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?"
"This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."
I couldn't believe I was hearing this. — David Mitchell

And then split his own cranium in half. I would like to see you do that yourself Blore. It would take some practice. — Lombard Philip Lombard

Time if the inner form of animal sense that animates events-the still frames-of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures-a series of spatial states-into an order, into the 'current' of life. Motion is created in our minds by running "film cells" together. Remember that everything you perceive-even this page-is actively, repeatedly, being constructed inside your head. It's happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could stop its "motor" for a moment, you'd get a freeze frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states. — Robert Lanza

The object of my researches is the brain. The cranium is only a faithful cast of the external surface of the brain, and is consequently but a minor part of the principal object. — Franz Joseph Gall

She wants to jig and amble, she wants to lisp, she wants to suck the last slurp of essence out of his almost-voided cranium. Avaunt, wanton! — Margaret Atwood

I was at a bar, and this guy bumped into me, and he did not apologize, and he said, "Move!" I thought that was rude, so I said, "Go to hell!" Then I started to run. He caught up to me. He had a mustache, a goatee, a pair of earrings, sunglasses, a ponytail and he was wearing a hat. He said, "Hey, you got a lot of nerve!" I said, "Hey, you got a lot of ... cranium accessories!" — Mitch Hedberg

The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum. — Herman Melville

It was not a very prepossessing accessory for all it's serviceability, being both outlandish in design and indifferent in shape. It was a drab slate gray color, with cream ruffle trim, and it had a shaft in the new ancient-Egyptian style that looked rather like an elongated pineapple. Despite it's many advanced attributes, Lady Maccon's most common application of the parasol was through brute force enacted directly upon the cranium of an opponent. It was a crude and perhaps undignified modus operandi to be certain but it had worked so well for her in the past that she was loathe to rely too heavily on any of the newfangled aspects of her parasol's character. — Gail Carriger

Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. — Vladimir Nabokov

Norman picked up a sketch, glanced at it, then put it back down on the table. "I saw Bea Williamson this morning," he said in a low voice. "Lurking about looking for cut glass."
"Oh, of course," Mira said with a sigh. "Did she have it with her?"
Norman nodded solemnly. "Yep. I swear, I think it's almost gotten ... bigger."
Mira shook her head. "Not possible."
"I'm serious," Norman said. "It's way big."
I kept waiting for someone to expand on this, but since neither of them seemed about to, I asked, "What are you talking about?"
They looked at each other.
Then, Mira took a breath. "Bea Williamson's baby," she said quietly, as if someone could hear us, "has the biggest head you have ever seen."
Norman nodded, seconding this.
"A baby?" I said.
"A big-headed baby," Mira corrected me. "You should see the cranium on this kid. It's mind-boggling. — Sarah Dessen

Among all mental diseases that have been systematically inoculated into the human cranium, the religious pest is the most abominable. — Johann Most

Short, square, cleanshaven, his head seemed carved out of an elephant's tusk, the whole massive cone of ivory left more or less complete in its original shape, eyes hollowed out deep in the roots, the rest of the protuberance accommodating his other features, terminating in a perfectly colossal nose that stretched directly forward from the totally bald cranium. The nose was preposterous, grotesque, slapstick, a mask from a Goldoni comedy. — Anthony Powell

He places the skull in the palm of my hand. There are four canines; the top two are so long and curved I can feel them pricking my skin. There's a green tinge round the eye socket and in a fine line across the cranium. I'm not sure what animal it's from.
'Stoat,' Harris says, as if I've spoken out loud. 'They hunt grouse and partridge. I found it behind my house. I buried the body in the furze until it was just bone.'
His hand is still beneath mine, supporting it. I think of him seeing the small dead creature and digging a tiny grave for it. Planning ahead for all those months just so he'd see the skeleton. Or maybe he severed the animal's head and that was the only part he buried.
'It's been waiting for you all this time. Like I have. — Sanjida Kay

You are not apprehensive, are you? I can't detect no trace of fear none whatsoever
Roomy cranium all possible videos of all possible outcomes of current situation and envisage. — Terry Pratchett