Quotes & Sayings About Puppets

How many exes do you have? You're like a fame-whore, female pop star gone wild after she left her sock puppets show for more mature gig. — Rea Lidde

She talked about God giving man free will. Because of that, there is evil in the world. If God pulled everyone's strings all the time, we'd be puppets. — Janice Cantore

He thought for a moment. About puppets.
About being controlled.
Everyone was controlled by something, the Impressionist knew. By a spouse. A parent. A boss. A friend. By one's own impulses, be they dark or light.
Everyone was a puppet to something.
Most people just couldn't see the strings, is all. And so they didn't believe they were puppets in the first place. — Barry Lyga

When we were children, letters were like fun toys. We played with them through our building blocks. We colored them in books. We danced and sang along with TV puppets while learning C was for "cookie." Soon, letters turned into words. Words turned into sentences. Sentences turned into thoughts. And along the way, we stopped playing with them and stopped marveling at A through Z. — Ji Lee

I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation
not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either. — Wally Lamb

First of all I think of puppets as sculpture. They are sculpture that moves. You could label it any way you want, but for me it always starts in my mind as a sculpture. — Wayne White

We are no longer puppets being manipulated by outside powerful forces: we become the powerful force ourselves. — Leo Buscaglia

If asked to name the definitive image in Lovecraft, one might likely say its tentacles flailing from the body of a monster. For me it would be probably be puppets, manikins, and clown-like things, even though these are more often a matter of metaphor than a literal presence of a monstrous type. Nevertheless, if Lovecraft's tentacle monsters and my puppets and so on fought each other, I think the monsters would win. — Thomas Ligotti

Any movie about cult figure Charles Manson needs lots of sex, drugs and blood. But as John Roecker discovered while filming his first feature
screening Friday and Saturday only at the Avalon
the key to amping up the gore is an old standby: puppets. — John Roecker

He's the boy who smokes Marlboro cigarettes and I'm the girl who makes theater puppets. Dreams and ashes - two things in the universe that should never meet because they are opposites, right? — Rae Hachton

If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that ... that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it? — Margaret Atwood

Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are. — Joss Whedon

And this totally normal conversation unspools from there, covering the basics: family, siblings, school, favorite composers, favorite movies, favorite wood (for carving puppets), the prehistory of the sandwich, and whether the ancient Romans got their togas caught in the spokes of their unicycles — Laini Taylor

I do a public access show with puppets. Puppets called actors, TV and movie stars. — Craig Ferguson

[About John Updike's Rabbit Run] The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves, or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world. — Chicago Tribune

Once again, both Chris and I were manipulated like small puppets in our world of adults. We didn't like it, and we suffered, but the tall ones around us said that we would soon get over our sadness, that we would "adapt" in a matter of weeks. — Irene Hunt

Perhaps one of the walls to such a room would have built into it a sliding panel that could be opened only from the other side. And next to that room would be another room that was unfurnished and seemed never to have been occupied. But leaning against one wall of this other room, directly below the sliding panel, would be some long wooden sticks; and mounted at the ends of these sticks would be horrible little puppets. — Thomas Ligotti

For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands. — Pico Iyer

Since nostaglia is fueled by inflation, could it be that inflation is the result of a conspiracy by the people who are trying to palm off McGovern buttons and Howdy Doody puppets and their Aunt Thelma's toaster as antiques. — Calvin Trillin

We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom. And in this same act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline — Peter Berger

That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed. — Jhumpa Lahiri

So while you're trying to improvise, you're also trying to puppeteer, you're doing everything that you need to do to perform a puppet in our style, for a camera. — Brian Henson

I've carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it's on stage, the show belongs to the puppet. — Guy Davenport

Religion and its defenders have always been the most insidious enemy of the true faith precisely because they are not glaring opponents; they are impostors. A raving pagan is easier to dismiss than an elder in your church. Before Jesus came along, the Pharisees ran the show. Everybody took what they said as gospel - even though it didn't sound like good news at all. But we wrestle not against flesh and blood. The Pharisees and their brethren down through the ages have merely acted - unknowingly, for the most part - as puppets, the mouthpiece of the Enemy. — John Eldredge

The people in the city seem paper thin in the mist. They believe they are dancing to the music of their lives ... But I think, like the puppets, each of us is pulled upon invisible strings, until the night comes and we are put away. I shiver, and hurry from the square, as the darkness of the city closes over me like canal water or the grave. — Neil Gaiman

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest ... — James Branch Cabell

All service ranks the same with God,- With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first. — Robert Browning

In fact, in the history of a lot of cultures there is a theater. For example, there are the theaters in Java, [Indonesia] and of that area where they use puppets and they have backgrounds and shadows. — Michelle Stuart

To be honest, it's probably better if I don't talk. Cute guys make me nervous. Like tongued-tied total-brain-malfunction nervous. All my filters shut off and suddenly I'm telling them about the time I peed my pants in the third grade during a field trip to the maple syrup factory, or how I'm scared of puppets and have mild OCD that could possibly drive me to tidy up your room the moment you turn your head. — Elle Kennedy

They were all puppets, animated by the properties, responsibilities, and relationships they were tied to, — Lee Goldberg

He puppeteers really responded to it. Patrick Bistrow really responded to it, it's great fun to do improve comedy with puppets. — Brian Henson

We are all puppets hanging over an ocean of madness. — Alexander Gordon Smith

Put your puppet on the throne." said Talathain. "You may make her Queen but she won't be Queen for long. — Holly Black

Sitting makes us think of standing
Our current stance keeps on demanding
We wish to fly without the wings
Puppets move before pulling the strings — Munia Khan

The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated. — John Kenneth Galbraith

SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE IN FATE, OTHERS DON'T. I DO, and I don't. It may seem at times as if invisible fingers move us about like puppets on strings. But for sure, we are not born to be dragged along. We can grab the strings ourselves and adjust our course at every crossroad, or take off at any little trail into the unknown. — Thor Heyerdahl

What are you
listening to?"
"I picked up a DVD for Luke while I was
out. Something with Mozart and sock
puppets."
A grin rose to my lips. "At this stage I
don't think Luke can see more than ten
inches beyond his face."
"That explains his lack of interest. I
thought maybe he preferred Beethoven. — Lisa Kleypas

A puppet that starts to improvise badly is almost funnier than the puppet that's improvising well. So the show gets better when the improvising is really good, but also the show can also sometimes get better when the improvising sort of goes a little wrong and that's sort of a blessing to improvising with puppets. — Brian Henson

Puppets go to sleep the moment they break free from their strings. — Les Coleman

Religion is for followers ... Followers and puppets. — Ellen Hopkins

Once I'm on stage, there's just no time for a sip of water - I've always got my hands in puppets! My voice is raw by the time I finish. — Nina Conti

I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want. — Kristen Schaal

Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance. — W. H. Auden

In a Democracy, the real rulers are the dexterous manipulators of votes, with their placemen, the mechanics who so skillfully operate the hidden springs which move the puppets in the arena of democratic elections. Men of this kind are ever ready with loud speeches lauding equality; in reality, they rule the people as any despot or military dictator might rule it. — Konstantin Pobedonostsev

For me, the stereoscopic imagery was a new game to play with. Surprisingly enough, it's also a return to tradition. I'm back with paper-looking puppets moving about in several layers of theatrical backgrounds. — Michel Ocelot

I would love to work with Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, B.B. King. I'd love to do something with Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane, and The Last Shadow Puppets. If I got a call from Juliette Lewis or PJ Harvey, or Chrissie Hynde, that'd be a thrill. — Imelda May

I gaze lovingly at "Hilal" a love that is reflected through time or what we imagine to be time, as in a mirror. She was never mine and never will be; that is how it is. We are both creators and creatures, but we are also puppets in God's hands, and there is a line we cannot cross, a line that was drawn for reasons we cannot know. We can approach and even dabble our toes in the river but we are forbidden to plunge in and let ourselves be carried along by the current. — Paulo Coelho

We must control the politics and the politicians of our community. They must no longer take orders from outside forces. We will organize, and sweep out of office all Negro politicians who are puppets for the outside forces. — Malcolm X

I wanted to deconstruct the puppet show. I wanted to turn it inside out and do stuff that you're not supposed to do. I didn't want it to be gentle like most puppet shows tend to be, since they come from childhood where you're gently trying to tell a story. I wanted to blast all that out of the water. I think there's plenty of room of any kind of attitude toward puppets. I call puppeteering acting while hiding. — Wayne White

Puppets allow a person to express things through this surrogate that wouldn't normally get expressed. You know there's famous techniques of puppet therapists. Put this hand puppet on and tell me what the problem is. — Wayne White

A lot of the strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own minds. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants, but there isn't any way to punish a large number of deviants. It's too expensive to even try. So, the solution is to colonize the minds of children as they're growing up, so that they become their own police, and to report on others who are deviating. — John Taylor Gatto

That is a considerable amount of puppets. But ... [Proceeds to summon one hundred puppets of his own] With this, I took down a whole country — Masashi Kishimoto

It will hurt." said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness. — Orson Scott Card

I'm a talk-show junkie. I'd rather listen to real folks stumbling to express their own thoughts than to polished puppets reading what others have written. — Donella Meadows

The cold war was over, but all the little games persisted. It was a good thing those puppets in the Middle East had been too busy grubbing around in their deserts to play any serious role in international espionage ... She took a calming moment to visualize the entire Arab world as a giant parking lot. Lovely. — Magnus Flyte

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk. — Luigi Pirandello

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist. — Julian Jaynes

Dance, you jazz-mad puppets of fate, and — Dorothy Parker

What are we (I ask) but puppets in a show-box? Oh, omnipotent Destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our moserable little stage! — Wilkie Collins

The way I talk to the puppets is real, and it's in the moment, and it's seeing what will happen. It's not something that is scripted. — Nina Conti

Take this. It's one of my gothics. The seventies were, sadly, not the time to include sex scenes of any satisfying nature. When the lights go out, you can imagine the hero and heroine are lying in bed, fully clothed, making shadow puppets on the wall. — Kelley Armstrong

Freedom's never been free, there's always been a price to be paid, but people have forgotten; they're handing their freedom, their lives, over like well behaved puppets on a string ... slavery is returning by choice. — L.M. Fields

You got warlords still running free, but yet you want a stable Liberia. You got puppets as leaders still signing off Liberia's resources to foreigners, but yet you want a developed Liberia. They are threat to a progressive Liberia. — Henry Johnson Jr

Funny enough, there have been puppets in everything I've written because I have a huge love of puppets. There's a big puppet musical at the end of 'Sarah Marshall.' I wrote 'The Muppets.' — Jason Segel

I make tiny wooden people with bits of hair. Puppets and things like that. — PJ Harvey

There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought. — Christian Nestell Bovee

We are all puppets in front of god. He gives things to us and he takes them back. It is his way of showing his existence. — Viraj J. Mahajan

A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. — William S. Burroughs

It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. — C.S. Lewis

My faith is that I don't believe in fate! We are not puppets or zombies of destiny. We are the main painters of our life's canvas. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

We all present a version of ourselves whether you've got a puppet on your hand or not. To actually be very real out there in a public way, why? — Mel Gibson

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

But why is God so slow in conquering the forces of evil? Why does not God break in and smash the evil schemes of wicked men? ... We are responsible human beings, not blind automatons; persons, not puppets. By endowing us with freedom, God relinquished a measure of his own sovereignty and imposed certain limitations upon himself. If his children are free, they must do his will by a voluntary choice. Therefore, God cannot at the same time impose his will upon his children and also maintain his purpose for man. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Why shouldn't loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare? — Nell Zink

So, after all, we are but puppets, creatures of our fate, not commanding it but being molded by it. — Eleanor Roosevelt

My puppets are far more liberated than I am. Ventriloquism is a useful way of expressing myself. — Nina Conti

I'm sure in a lot of publishing houses that there is a frustration that people feel, that they're not in control, that they are puppets and the corporate bosses are manipulating the strings. — Larry Kirshbaum

Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets. — W. Somerset Maugham

The true and lasting genius of humour does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must be antiseptic. — Mark Twain

We are like puppets synchronized by god ... — Mayank Prasad

We took a show to the Aspen Comedy Festival, called "Puppet Up" at that point, and in Aspen we just did three shows, and in Aspen, there was a producer from the Edinborough Fringe Festival, who said, "Please come to Edinborough." — Brian Henson

Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,
To our bower at the lily root.
Overhead the old umbrellas of summer Wither like pithless hands.
There is little shelter.
Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank
Dominion. The stars are no nearer. Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink The liquor of indolence, and all thing sink Into a soft caul of forgetfulness. The fugitive colors die. Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,
The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.
Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppetmaster
Wear masks of horn to bed. This is not death, it is something safer. The wingy myths won't tug at us anymore: The molts are tongueless that sang from above the water Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,
And how a god flimsy as a baby's finger
Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. — Sylvia Plath

What was most important in Epicurus' philosophy of nature was the overall conviction that our life on this earth comes with no strings attached; that there is no Maker whose puppets we are; that there is no script for us to follow and be constrained by; that it is up to us to discover the real constraints which our own nature imposes on us. — Epicurus

I am ... persuaded that Woolf was right, that every novel has a characteristic rhythm. And that if the writer hasn't listened for that rhythm and followed it, the sentences will be lame, the characters will be puppets, the story will be false. And if the writer can hold to that rhythm, the book will have some beauty. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And then after the success at Melbourne Comedy Festival, then we regrouped back in LA and we went back into workshopping and decided to develop a proper show and that's when we started working on "Stuffed and Unstrung," which is a much bigger and sharper version of "Puppet Up." — Brian Henson

And I keep on fighting for the things I want. Though I know that when you're dead you can't. But I'd rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave. — Jimmy Cliff

He had never regarded other men as anything but puppets of a sort, created to fill up an empty world. He divided them into two classes: those he greeted because some chance had put him in contact with them, and those he did not greet. But both these categories of individuals were equally insignificant in his eyes.
("An Old Man") — Guy De Maupassant

And we saved your life, y'know," Andrew said, jerking his head in Oliver's direction. "I mean, the least you could do is thank us."
"Of course!" Oliver said hastily. "Thank you very much."
"It was really dangerous back there," Patricia said earnestly, as though wanting to make sure he understood the severity of the situation.
"Yes, beheading is a serious business, I suppose," Oliver said kindly. "I think it would have been difficult to keep on living once my head was chopped off. — Zeinab Alayan

He looks up. Again, it is there in the sky. The planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. It is very close now. So close that he wonders if he could touch it. As he reaches up, he thinks he sees movement on its surface. Through the canopy of the forests and upon the slopes of the mountains and on the shores of the churning ocean. People maybe. Crowds of people all wrapped in white cloth. They are leaning into each other like dropped puppets. They sway lifelessly. He feels horror in the back of his throat, but still he reaches up. He can't help himself. It's just what he does next. — Joseph Fink

But we never get back our youth ... The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. — Oscar Wilde

People react differently to puppets than they do to human performers: they become more playful, more open. — Kathe Koja

Buster was not used to this experience, physical desire that was actually fulfilled. In his entire life, he had kissed five women. One of them had been his sister. This was, Buster understood, a terrible percentage. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd had sex and still have enough fingers left over to make complicated shadow puppets. — Kevin Wilson

We did just leave an insane asylum," Hi agreed. "For all we know, Chance spend his nights dancing naked with sock puppets, plotting to invade Canada. — Kathy Reichs

will" - he looked up at Blake - "like we talked about before. God does not want puppets. If we choose evil, He allows us. — MaryLu Tyndall

German puppets
burnt the Jews
Jewish puppets
did not choose
Puppet vultures
eat the dead
Puppet corpses
they are fed
Puppet winds and
puppet waves
Puppet sailors
in their graves
Puppet flower
Puppet stem
Puppet Time
dismantles them
Puppet me and
puppet you
Puppet German
Puppet Jew
Puppet presidents
command
puppet troops to
burn the land
Puppet fire
puppet flames
feed on all the
puppet names
Puppet lovers
in their bliss
turn away from
all of this
Puppet reader
shakes his head
takes his puppet
wife to bed
Puppet night
comes down to say
the epilogue to
puppet day — Leonard Cohen

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?-Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out. — William Makepeace Thackeray

I secretly wanted to act. I also wanted be a toy designer and make puppets. — Kate Micucci

He stared at Avery's socks and felt an odd sense of wonder. Socks were so normal. So mundane. How could someone who pulled on socks in the morning be a serial killer? Socks were not hard or dangerous. Socks were funny; foot mittens, that's what socks were. They made a knobbly hinge of your toes and became comical sock-puppets. Surely anyone who wore socks could not truly be a threat to him or anyone else? — Belinda Bauer

Mom," said Peter, "nobody thinks you're a lackwit, if that's what you're worried about."
Lackwit? In what musty drawer of some dead English professor's dust-covered desk did you find that word? I assure you that never in my worst nightmares did I ever suppose that I was a lackwit. — Orson Scott Card

Russian Parliament today is a bunch of puppets that just fall in with the instructions from Kremlin. — Garry Kasparov