Old Skulls Quotes & Sayings

Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain; - These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull ... — Heinrich Heine

It was still white, and it still glowed under the moon, and the cobbles were still as rounded as old skulls, and the leaves still looked like splashes of blood across the stones, but Rhea felt better. She was still going somewhere terrible, but she had a hedgehog, dammit. — T. Kingfisher

I believe in a higher power and I believe in good and bad, right and wrong. You sleep in the bed you make. — Leif Garrett

I sometimes think about old tombs and weeds
That interwreathe among the bones of kings
With cold and poisonous berry and black flower:
Or ruminate upon the skulls of steeds
Frailer than shells and on those luminous wings -
The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power,
Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grind
Into so wraith-like a translucency
Of tissue-thin and aqueous bone
- A Reverie of Bone — Mervyn Peake

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy. — Alexander Theroux

A Place in the Forest On the way there a pair of startled wings clattered up, that was all. You go there alone. There is a tall building which consists entirely of cracks, a building which is perpetually tottering but can never collapse. The thousand-fold sun floats in through the cracks. In this play of light an inverted law of gravity prevails: the house is anchored in the sky and whatever falls, falls upwards. You can turn round there. There you are allowed to grieve. You can dare to see certain old truths which are otherwise kept packed, in storage. The roles I have, deep down, float up there, hang like the dried skulls in the ancestral cabin on some out-of-the-way Melanesian islet. A childlike aura round the gruesome trophies. So mild it is, in the forest. — Tomas Transtromer

Did you ever hear tell,'
said Jimmy Farrell,
'of the skulls they have
in the city of Dublin?
White skulls and black skulls
and yellow skulls, and some
with full teeth, and some
haven't only but one,'
and compounded history
in the pan of 'an old Dane,
maybe, was drowned
in the Flood.'
My words lick around
cobbled quays, go hunting
lightly as pampooties
over the skull-capped ground.
-Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces — Seamus Heaney

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me. — Greg Egan

Hing hang hung! the words rang faintly through his daydream like echoes of Miz Cunningham's tart little doorbell. Then he looked again at the old woman herself. Why, she was really quite wonderful - this old fat woman! In the end, she got her hands on nearly everything in the world! Just look at her window! There by the pair of old overshoes were Jamey Hankins' ice skates. There was old Walt Spoon's elk's tooth. There - his mother's own wedding ring! There was a world in the window of this remarkable old woman. And it was probable that when Miz Cunningham like an ancient barn owl fluttered and flapped to earth at last, they would take her away and pluck her open and find her belly lined with fur and feathers and the tiny mice skulls of myriad dreams. — Davis Grubb

The endowment and sealing ordinances of the temple are so gloriously rich in meaning that you will want to allow significant time to receive those ordinances and to ponder their meaning. — Richard G. Scott

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! — Allen Ginsberg

At Keramzin, I had a doll I made out of an old sock that I used to talk to whenever he was away hunting. Maybe that would make me feel better."
"You were an odd little girl."
"You have no idea. What did you and Tolya play with?"
"The skulls of our enemies."
I saw the glint in her eye, and we both burst out laughing. — Leigh Bardugo

How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not
necessary to safeguard us from discrimination — Barbra Streisand

Throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down. — John D. MacDonald

Goodness will always win over evil, no matter how much the evil attempts to break you. More than that, you are never truly in darkness. Sometimes, all you need to do is turn on the light. — Melyssa Winchester

Is this not the reason I write, to leave a piece of me behind? — Aisha Mirza

You know, many people believe that we archaeologists are just a collection of old fogies digging around in the ruins after old dried up skulls and bones. — Griffin Jay

We are thankful for these and all the good things of life. We recognize that they are a part of our common heritage and come to us through the efforts of our brothers and sisters the world over. What we desire for ourselves, we wish for all. To this end, may we take our share in the world's work and the world's struggles. — J. S. Woodsworth

it may be worth while to note again how often finely developed skulls are discovered in the graveyards of old monasteries, and how likely seems Galtons conjecture, that progress was arrested in the Middle Ages, because the celibacy of the clergy brought about the extinction of the best strains of blood. — John Beddoe

Isn't it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn't going to be room to bury anyone anymore? For my ninth birthday last year, Grandma gave me a subscription to National Geographic, which she calls "the National Geographic." She also gave me a white blazer, because I only wear white clothes, and it's too big to wear so it will last me a long time. She also gave me Grandpa's camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn't take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it."
I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still." Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls! — Jonathan Safran Foer

How he died hadn't been funny, Newt thought.
"It's all right, though," Augustus said. "It's mostly bones we're riding over anyway. Why, think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains. Buffalo and other critters too. And the Indians have been here forever; their bones are down there in the earth. I'm told that over in the Old Country you can't dig six feet without uncovering skulls and leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kinda filled up the ground. It's interesting to think about, all the bones in the ground. But it's just fellow creatures, it's nothing to shy from. — Larry McMurtry

Wuthering Heights love. She stood outside his window at night. She drew little pictures of him in class. She looked at the moon and cried. She drew little pictures of the moon in class and cried at them. — Anonymous

She deserved more, so much more than me; an angry, depressed, broken man. I couldn't give her what she needed - love. So, I did what I had asked her to do. I left. — K.I. Lynn

Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for. — Tim Powers

Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It's the closest they'll ever get to being inside a working spaceship. — Drew Magary

Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted - and their knowledge deepened - by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all. — Matthew Syed

Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie? — Daniel Quinn

If we are cultivating fruit in an orchard, we wish that particular fruit to grow in its own way; we give it the soil it needs, the amount of moisture, the amount of care, but we do not treat the apple tree as we would the pear tree or the peach tree as we would the vineyard on the hillside. Each is allowed the freedom of its own kind and the result is the perfection of growth which can be accomplished in no other way. The time must come when the same freedom is allowed the individual; each in his own way must develop according to nature's purpose, the body must be but the channel for the expression of purpose, interest, emotion, labor. Everywhere freedom must be the sign of reason. — Robert Henri

The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic, and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable with their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe. — Anonymous

The View from Europe And that was Africa: the long line to the south little higher than the Atlantic that defined it. The sea rolled its drums on the shore, broke in white foam, flowers for the hair of the girls. I sipped the wind with my nostrils, and the smell was the smell of fear. Two million- year-old skulls surfaced from soil fathoms, grinning their disdain at the accuracy of the new weapons. And that was Eden indeed: Adam was black and the woman, Eve, was black; and the serpent, master of the click languages, spoke to them sibilantly of how the machine would sound as it waited under the tree of death, offering them nothing but a pretence of life. 1988 — R.S. Thomas

I know people think erotica is just a romance novel with rougher sex. It's not. If it's a subgenre of anything, it's horror.
Horror? Really?
Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear. — Tiffany Reisz

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep
all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. — Aravind Adiga

if you have a destination programmed into your subconscious you'll make the right decisions to take you in that general direction - — Chris Croft

Certain grammatical rules are arbitrary, but the need to have these arbitrary rules is not arbitrary. — Douglas Wilson