Quotes & Sayings About Marionettes

But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation. These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just "dolled up" on the outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity. — Salman Rushdie

We're all just marionettes, Ashline," Eve said softly. "Dangling, dancing, waiting. You can pretend like you pull your own strings, but in the end your only hope is that you've landed in the hands of someone who knows what the hell they're doing. — Karsten Knight

I've gone into the outside world to reobserve society. The sign language of emotion I once knew has been replaced by a matrix of interrelated equations. Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do. At — Ted Chiang

I want to build spires in their minds and dance shadows through like marionettes, chased by whispers and hints of the unspeakable. — Laini Taylor

He stared in something like disbelief. He'd seen a man convulse after being struck by a bolt of lighting once.
Watching the marionettes was just that pleasant. — Julie Anne Long

The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do. — Ted Chiang

Marionettes that control their own strings. — Erin Morgenstern

Here is the basic question: Are we marionettes, or are we creatures of free will who just happen to have a lot of jerky reflexes? — Robert Breault

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century - or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. — Laini Taylor

Some will be always strong, and some will be always weak; and though, if there is no God, no divine and fatherly source of order, there will be, trust me, no aristocracies, there will still be tyrannies. There will still be rich and poor; and that will then mean happy and miserable; and the poor will be--as I sometimes think they are already--but a mass of groaning machinery, without even the semblance of rationality; and the rich, with only the semblance of it, but a set of gaudy, dancing marionettes, which is the machinery's one work to keep in motion. — William Hurrell Mallock

Said by whom? Said to whom? Not by a mind to a mind, but by a being who has body and language to a being who has body and language, each drawing the other by invisible threads like those who hold the marionettes-making the other speak, think, and become what he is but never would have been by himself. Thus things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us. There is said to be a wall between us and others, but it is a wall we build together, each putting his stone in the niche left by the other. Even reason's labors presuppose such infinite conversations. All those we have loved, detested, known, or simply glimpsed speak through our voice. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

You know, a carving, especially if it's polychrome, is not meant to move. These faces, these half-bodies, when you animate them, they're more live than the living. They can be dangerous for those who don't really understand them. With contained energy, no one can predict what will happen when it's released. — Jacques Yonnet

Tinsley felt like a puppeteer playing with her marionettes, holding all the strings. — Cecily Von Ziegesar

He is a curious avatar. Passion and pain, made manifest. The dreams he had are gone. All that is left is this unflinching need to prove the world false. Does he truly understand his own actions? Or does he merely flail about as marionettes do without skilled hands to guide them? — Grant Smuts

A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause
And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment's scene. — Sri Aurobindo

Who's more interesting: A famous scientist, or the famous who plays the cello and whittles marionettes in a lighthouse at the edge of the world where he sometimes writes poetry by the light of passing ships? Exactly. Follow your weird impulses and do all sorts of things. Getting sidetracked can lead you to exactly where you belong. — Jessica Hagy

You're going to work some puppets for me. Marionettes. That sound too hard?" "Marionettes? — Sara Pennypacker

I want to terrify little kids, too! I want to build spires in their minds and dance shadows through like marionettes, chased by whispers and hints of the unspeakable. I want to torture future generations with the Puppet That Bites. — Laini Taylor

When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time - at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I'm the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I broke the mold under my heel. — Laird Barron