Quotes & Sayings About Sockets

The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can't see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My — Margaret Atwood

First, however, and feeling real excitement at the thought, the good burst of adrenaline at last, Behringer wanted to dismantle the sockets and loosen his patient's eyes. Behringer — Jonathan Lethem

It had to be Death. No-one else went around with empty eye sockets and, of course, the scythe over one shoulder was another clue. — Terry Pratchett

You don't ever doubt me again," he said hoarsely before his mouth grazed my nipples, first the left and then the right. His scruffy beard scraped the skin beneath raw as he went back and forth. "I will fucking kill you if you ever doubt me again!" he snarled.
My eyes rolled back into their sockets at the weight of his words, the desperation in his voice matching the desperation in my movements. I moaned as he bit my nipple harder, almost chewing it between his teeth. I was trapped underneath him, and even though I knew I could push him away, I also knew I wouldn't.
"You answer me when I'm talking to you! " he roared.
"I won't," I breathed, my hands in his short hair. "Oh, God, I won't."
"You won't what! "
"I will never doubt you again!"
"You're damn right you won't. — T.J. Klune

Michael staggered to his feet and turned to face his worst nightmare. Baal stood before him, a smirk on his face. He wore his signature grey, pinstripe, three-piece suit, and casually twisted his pinky ring on his long and slender well-manicured finger. As it rotated Michael caught a glimpse of the rubies in the skull's eye sockets. His black hair was slicked back, the sight of his false appearance made Michael sick to his stomach. — Wendy Owens

Swelter's eyes meet those of his enemy, and never has there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred. Had the flesh, the fibres, and the bones of the chef and those of Mr Flay been conjured away and away down that dark corridor leaving only their four eyes suspended in mid-air outside the Earl's door, then, surely, they must have reddened to the hue of Mars, reddened and smouldered, and at last broken into flame, so intense was their hatred - broken into flame and circled about one another in ever-narrowing gyres and in swifter and yet swifter flight until, merged into one sizzling globe of ire they must surely have fled, the four in one, leaving a trail of blood behind them in the cold grey air of the corridor, until, screaming as they fly beneath innumerable arches and down the endless passageways of Gormenghast, they found their eyeless bodies once again, and reentrenched themselves in startled sockets. — Mervyn Peake

When you lost your brother, was there someone to comfort you?"
"Yes," said Laurent. "In a way."
"Then I'm glad," said Damen. "I'm glad that you weren't alone."
Laurent pushed himself away, up into a sitting position, and for a moment he sat, without speaking. He pushed his palms into his eye sockets.
"What is it?"
"It's nothing," said Laurent. — C.S. Pacat

PAYING ATTENTION TO GOD We bless GOD, oh yes - we bless him now, we bless him always! PSALM 115:18, THE MESSAGE Prayer is the most thoroughly present act we have as humans, and the most energetic: it sockets the immediate past into the immediate future and makes a flexible, living joint of them. The Amen gathers what has just happened into the Maranatha of the about to happen and produces a Benediction. We pay attention to God and lead others to pay attention to God. It hardly matters that so many people would rather pay attention to their standards of living, or their self-image, or their zeal to make a mark in the world. The reality is God: worship or flee. THE CONTEMPLATIVE PASTOR — Eugene H. Peterson

The biggest surprise watching video on the tiny, 2.5-inch screen (320 by 240 pixels) is completely immersive. Three unexpected factors are at work. First, the picture itself is sharp and vivid, with crisp action that never smears the screen is noticeably brighter than on previous iPods. Second, because the audio is piped directly into your ear sockets, it has much higher fidelity and presence than most peoples TV sets. Finally, remember that a 2.5-inch screen a foot from your face fills as much of your vision as a much larger screen thats across the room. — David Pogue

Paul confronted his son then, aiming the eyeless sockets at Leto. "Do you really know the universe you have created here? — Frank Herbert

Charley's consumption and indigestion had only become more lacerating; his eye sockets were as deep and dark as fistholes in the snow, his gums were strangely purple, he wore extravagant gold rings on every finger and a clove of garlic around his neck according to the guidance of a gypsy named Madame Africa. Bob was skinny, sallow, peevish, his complexion spoiled with so many pimples that some correspondents thought it was measles. — Ron Hansen

He walked slowly into the middle of the clearing and looked steadily at the skull that gleamed as white as ever the conch had done and seemed to jeer at him cynically An inquisitive ant was busy in one of the eye sockets but otherwise the thing was lifeless. Or was it? — William Golding

Death's face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant. I SEE, he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat-haters. YOU LIKE GREAT BIG DOGS, I IMAGINE. — Terry Pratchett

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets. — Cormac McCarthy

We're so old that the winds of age echo along our ribs and pick at our eye sockets. We could be gone tomorrow. A chill, say, or a little slip on the cliff side. I feel as fragile as a dried flower. I rattle a little in the moving air, but I'm only coherent dust-a shape of what once was. My essence is going. — Sheri S. Tepper

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own live, and this is right and healthy. — Kory Stamper

And I had the most disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from that game of solitaire and the sockets of her eyes would be empty. — Anne Rice

Set screamed something in Ancient Egyptian. I was fairly sure it wasn't a compliment.
"I will rend your limbs from their sockets!" he shouted. "I will - "
"Die?" Carter suggested. — Rick Riordan

I hate cats."
Death's face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant.
"I SEE," he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat haters. — Terry Pratchett

How dare you open a spaceman's helmet on an uncharted planet? My eyeballs could've been sucked from their sockets! — Cathy East Dubowski

I have one important question to ask you before I kiss you."
Kiss her? Her eyes had possibly bulged out of their sockets. Not good. "What?"
"Are you allergic to calamari? — Cari Silverwood

Zacharias's study bore the marks of his predecessors, whose taste had run decidedly stoicheiotical. They had had a fondness for skulls with burning lights in their eye sockets, crystal balls in which mysterious shapes came and went, and dark velvet window curtains traced with obscure runes. — Zen Cho

The unicorn was white, with hoofs of silver and graceful horn of pearl ... The glorious thing about him was his eye. There was a faint bluish furrow down each side of his nose, and this led to the eye sockets, and surrounded them in a pensive shade. The eyes, circled by this sad and beautiful darkness, were so sorrowful, lonely, gentle and nobly tragic, that they killed all other emotions except love. — T.H. White

The religion of the flag promptly replaced the cult of heaven, an old cloud which had already been deflated by the Reformation and reduced to a network of episcopal money boxes. In olden times the fanatical fashion was: 'Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics!' . . . But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary . . . Whereas today vast hordes of men are fired with aim and purpose by cries of 'Hang the limp turnips! The juiceless lemons! The innocent readers! By the millions, eyes right!' If anybody doesn't want to fight or murder, grab 'em, tear 'em to pieces! Kill them in thirteen juicy ways. For a starter, to teach them how to live, rip their guts out of their bodies, their eyes out of their sockets, and the years out of their filthy slobbering lives! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practised on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practised dreamer slips into like a bone slips into its sockets — Henry Miller

All right. Tell me what I'm looking at." From the improvised Rolling Stones T-shirt bag tied to my sash, Bob the Skull said, in his most caustic voice, "A giant pair of cartoon lips." I muttered a curse and fumbled with the shirt until one of the skull's glowing orange eye sockets was visible. A big goofy magic nerd!" Bob said. — Jim Butcher

Tapping a little bell, I leaned on the desk and turned to look at a small, traditionally decorated Christmas tree on a table near the entranceway. It was complete with shiny, egg-fragile bulbs; miniature candy canes; flat, laughing Santas with arms wide; a star on top nodding awkwardly against the delicate shoulder of an upper branch; and colored lights that bloomed out of flower-shaped sockets. For some reason this seemed to me a sorry little piece. — Thomas Ligotti

Blank eyes stared from sunken sockets as if the divine force, the daimon, had been extinguished like a lamp, replaced by a weariness beyond description, a stare without effect, the hollow gaze of hell itself. — Pressfield, Steven

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!
Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. — Mary Shelley

Her eyes bothered him most. Unlike the Kai, hers were layers of opaque white, blue ringed in gray and black pinpoint centers that expanded or contracted with the light. The first time he'd witnessed that reaction in a human, all the hairs on his nape stood straight up. That, and the way the contrasting colors made it easy to see the eyes move in their sockets gave the impression they weren't body parts but entities unto themselves living as parasites inside their hosts' skulls.

He was used to seeing the frantic eye-rolling in a frightened horse but not a person. If the parasite impression didn't repulse him so much, he'd think humans lived in a constant state of hysterical terror. — Grace Draven

I'm a phallus in pigtails, and there's blood on my nose, and my tissue is rotting where the rats chew my bones. And my eye sockets empty, see nothing but pain, I keep having this brainstorm about twelve times a day. — David Bowie

When she's gone far and long enough that she no longer remembers her name, she stops, and presses her fingers deep into her sockets, scooping her eyes out and pinching off the long ropes of flesh that follow them out of her body like sticky yarn. What rushes from her mouth might be screaming or might be her soul, and it is smothered in the indifferent silence of the wild world. — Livia Llewellyn

AND NOW THERE REMAINS ONLY ONE FINAL QUESTION, he said. He raised his hands, and seemed to grow. Light flared in his eye sockets. When he spoke next, avalanches fell in the mountains. HAVE YOU BEEN NAUGHTY ... OR NICE? HO. HO. HO. — Terry Pratchett

Time is a vindictive bandit to steal the beauty of our former selves. We are left with sagging, rippled flesh and burning gums with empty sockets. — Raphael

How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies. How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher. — Gregory Maguire

While in general I avoid the use of torture - torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance - the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as the Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the Switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine. — William S. Burroughs

When they shall paint our sockets gray
And light us like a stinking fuse,
Remember that we once could say,
Yesterday we had a world to lose. — Stanley Kunitz

He returned with the tissue-restorer. I loosed it down the hatch, and after undergoing the passing discomfort, unavoidable when you drink Jeeves's patent morning revivers, of having the top of the skull fly up to the ceiling and the eyes shoot out of their sockets and rebound from the opposite wall like racquet balls, felt better. It — P.G. Wodehouse

The abandoned traffic lights stare at us like empty eye sockets. Fields have gone to weed. There's a little town of houses that have been haphazardly repaired by boards and scraps of metal. — Lauren DeStefano

Take him away. Prepare a feast. Forget nothing. My crown: the golden cutlery. The poison bottles; and the fumes; the wreaths of ivy and the bloody joints; the chains; the bowl of nettles; the spices; the baskets of fresh grass; the skulls and spines; the ribs and shoulder-blades. Forget nothing or, by the blindness of my sockets, I will have your hearts out. Take him away ... — Mervyn Peake

Dog, now Razor, gazed out from behind a dead man's face, fresh blood that wasn't his dripping into his eyes. He looked down at the corpses at his feet, the skinned skull of one staring back at him with dead eyes. Dog knelt down and plucked the orbs from their sockets, popped them in his mouth and chewed with hungry relish. — Jake Bible

At the age of three and a half the Taung Child was eaten by an eagle. The evidence is that damage marks to the eye sockets of the fossil are identical to marks made by modern eagles on modern monkeys as they rip out their eyes. Poor little Taung Child, shrieking on the wind as you were borne aloft by the aquiline fury, you would have found no comfort in your destined fame, two and a half million years on, as the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus. — Richard Dawkins

But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me - naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe's furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration) - but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description. — Samuel R. Delany

The next moment I was chained to my chair again,
the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;
my feet were scorched to a cinder,
my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather,
the bones of my legs hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze;
it ascended, caught my hair,
I was crowned with fire,
my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets;
I opened my mouth, it drank fire,
I closed it, the fire was within, ... and we burned, and burned! I was a cinder body and soul in my dream. — Charles Robert Maturin

How cruel is the golden rule
When the lives we lived are only golden-plated?
And I knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me
Though I carried carats for everyone to see.
And I saw God cry in the reflection of my enemies
And all the lovers with no time for me
And all of the mothers raise their babies
To stay away from me.
Tongues on the sockets of electric dreams
Where the sewage of youth drowned the spark of my teens
And I knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me (too heavy for me)
Though I carried carats for everyone to see (everyone to see).
And pray they don't grow up to be — Fall Out Boy

When I first met Billy I thought about sucking his eyes right out of their sockets. They're like turquoise gum drops. — Jo Treggiari

I am his tomb. The earth is nothing. Dead. Staves and orchards issue from my mouth. His. Perfume my chest, which is wide, wide open. A greengage plum swells his silence. The bees escape from his eyes, from his sockets where the liquid pupils have flowed from under the flaccid eyelids. To eat a youngster shot on the barricades, to devour a young hero, is no easy thing. We all love the sun. My mouth is bloody. So are my fingers. I tore the flesh to shreds with my teeth. Corpses do not usually bleed. His did. — Jean Genet

Their tunics bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped polls. — James Joyce

There are two events in everybody's life that nobody remembers. Two moments experienced by every living thing. Yet no one remembers anything about them. Nobody remembers being born and nobody remembers dying. Is that why we always stare into the eye sockets of a skull? Because we're asking, "What was it like?" "Does it hurt?" "Are you still scared?". — Steven Moffat

Isabel's infamous tweets ranged from the cartoonish and impossible:
Im going to pull ur tongue out of ur mouth wrap it around ur neck n strangle u w it so hard ur eyes will pop out. i will pee in the sockets.
To the quaint:
Get ur fcking hands off him bitch i will cut u. #RupertLIsMine
To the cryptically disturbing:
I watch u in your sleep.
I would never condone Isabel's scary tweets, but you had to give the girl credit for managing to stay under 140 characters every time. — Goldy Moldavsky

Every soul is engaged in a great work-the labor of personal liberation from the state of ignorance. The world is a great prison; its bars are the Unknown. And each is a prisoner until, at last, he earns the right to tear these bars from their moldering sockets, and pass, illuminated and inspired into the darkness, which becomes lighted by that presence — Manly P. Hall

His eyes were these bleak and empty abysses, like sockets. There was nothing there. The boy I thought I knew so well was gone. He looked so lost sitting there. I felt that old lurch, that gravitational pull, that desire to inhabit him - like wherever he was in this world, I would know where to find him, and I would do it. I would find him and take him home. I would take care of him, just like Susannah wanted. — Jenny Han

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding ... — William Gibson

Susan stared at him.
The blue glow in Death's eyes gradually faded, and as the light died it sucked at her gaze so that it was dragged into the eye sockets and into the darkness beyond ...
... which went on and on, for ever. There was no word for it. Even eternity was a human idea. Giving it a name gave it a length; admittedly, a very long one. But this darkness was what was left when eternity had given up. It was where Death lived. Alone. — Terry Pratchett

Emmett Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered ... I stood on a corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, and his mouth twisted and broken ... I couldn't get Emmett Till out of my mind, until one evening I thought of a way to get back at white people for his death. — Muhammad Ali

For a second i was just a kid, a kid who had lived all his life in the same tiny town. Just a child, because i knew i would have to live a lot more, suffer a lot more, to ever understand the searing agony in Edwards eyes. He raised his hands as if to wipe sweat from his forehead, but his fingers scraped against his face like they were going to rip his granite skin right off. His black eyes burned in their sockets, out of focus, or seeing things that weren't there. His mouth opened like he was going to scream, but nothing came out. This was the face of a man who would if he were burning at the stake. — Stephenie Meyer

would have seen a man with empty eye sockets, — Terry Hayes

My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her. — James Thurber

12And this shall be e the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. — Anonymous

What opposite discoveries we have seen!
(Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.)
One makes new noses, one a guillotine,
One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets;
But vaccination certainly has been
A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets, ... — Lord Byron

God is able to place stars in their sockets & suspend sky like a curtain; surely He is mighty enough to light your path. — Max Lucado

Giulietta pressed the letter against her heart. I know what you are thinking. You wish to protect me ... And you think Romeo will cause me pain. Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right ... but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without. — Anne Fortier

I'd hate to see the look on my face when that mask came down and I saw the face behind it. Thinner than I remember. Paler. The eyes sunk deep into their sockets, kind of glazed over, like he's sick or hurt, but I recognize it, I know whose face was hidden behind that mask. I just can't process it.
Here, in this place. A thousand years later and a million miles from the halls of George Barnard High School. Here, in the belly of the beast at the bottom of the world, standing right in front of me.
Benjamin Thomas Parish.
And Cassiopeia Marie Sullivan, having a full-bore out-of-body experience, seeing herself seeing him. The last time she saw him was in their high school gymnasium after the lights went out, and then only the back of his head, and the only times that she's seen him since happened in her mind, the rational part of which always knew Ben Parish was dead like everyone else. — Rick Yancey

As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by petit bourgeois retirees, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection upon their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy loges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, they are particularly inclined to do so when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all — Muriel Barbery

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries. — T. S. Eliot

I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical. — Alfred Nestor

It felt like her brain had become writhing worms inside of her skull, trying to escape through her eye sockets. — S.M. Reine

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. — Thomas Pynchon

The face before him was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was smooth, with a black strip of cloth tied over its forehead, and yet it was deeply furrowed, like the sea, that can have tall waves but not a wrinkle on the surface. The eyes were like dark chasms and yet they were the eyes of a human being and not empty sockets. The skin was a greenish olive colour and looked as if it were made of bronze ... — Gustav Meyrink

That's him!" he said. "That's the one!"
"Is it, indeed?" Inspector Hewitt asked, as he lifted the cap from my head and took the gown from my shoulders with the gentle deference of a valet.
The little man's pale blue eyes bulged visibly in their sockets.
"Why, it's only a girl!" he said.
I could have slapped his face. — Alan Bradley

Oh yeah, that's the one who kept watching me as if she was waiting for me to grow fangs and try to eat her. I couldn't help it - I used my claws to scratch my nose. Her eyes almost popped out of their sockets. — Nalini Singh

Late-Flowering Lust

My head is bald, my breath is bad,
Unshaven is my chin,
I have not now the joys I had
When I was young in sin.
I run my fingers down your dress
With brandy-certain aim
And you respond to my caress
And maybe feel the same.
But I've a picture of my own
On this reunion night,
Wherein two skeletons are shewn
To hold each other tight;
Dark sockets look on emptiness
Which once was loving-eyed,
The mouth that opens for a kiss
Has got no tongue inside.
I cling to you inflamed with fear
As now you cling to me,
I feel how frail you are my dear
And wonder what will be--
A week? or twenty years remain?
And then--what kind of death?
A losing fight with frightful pain
Or a gasping fight for breath?
Too long we let our bodies cling,
We cannot hide disgust
At all the thoughts that in us spring
From this late-flowering lust. — John Betjeman

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. — William Gibson

Lucifer's breath was like fire upon his skin. His eyes bulged from their sockets and he fought hard to breathe. — Shane K.P. O'Neill

It did matter to get out of bed. There were webs to weave. Strings to grasp. Packages to deliver. Conversations to start. Thoughts to be expressed. Sams to slam into. Oceans to swim. And sad little men hiding in electrical sockets, waiting to be born of the human imagination. — Bud Macfarlane Jr.

Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets. — Ruth Ozeki

I've seen elbows that broke eye sockets. I've seen a German goalkeeper just level a French guy. His teammates thought he was dead lying on the ground. This was in 1982 at my first World Cup. But a bite is outside any kind of contact collision: dirty foul play. A bite is a bite. — George Vecsey

Easy as a child breathes a wish at a dandelion ... is exactly how hard it would be for me to tear your limbs from their sockets. — Adam Levin

I walk back and forth past the bird one hundred and twenty-two times. I think of you and me, us, this elegant architecture called bird. Belly-up, beak to the north, wings splayed to the poles he disintegrates daily. In two days, his eyes are sockets, in four days, his under-feathers scatter to the east. The gentle wind detonates a downy bomb on still, green grass only a few stray flight-feathers cling to the skeleton — Micheline Maylor

The female runner still lags behind the male, and blame rests on the pelvis. The projections on the man's pelvis allow for more powerful muscles, but a woman equipped with them could not bear a child. Similarly, a man's hip sockets are closer together, nearer the center of gravity, which enables more efficient movement. If a woman's were similarly designed, there would be no room for the baby's head to extrude. So the odd pelvic bone represents a summation of many different requirements. When a woman wishes she could run faster or sway less or have a narrower base, let her know that the survival of the human race depends upon her being just the shape she is. — Philip Yancey

His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse's. — Richard K. Morgan

Tied to my reading lamp was a single balloon. Filled with helium, it floated in a morning sunray which slanted in through one of the high windows.

On it was a picture of my face, the eyes gone, blood running down from the ragged sockets, a scream distorting the mouth on the balloon's thin and bulging rubber skin.

I looked at it and I screamed. — Stephen King

I meeped something to the affirmative, and then flew out into the hall. My entire body was flaming as I pressed one hand against my still-tingling lips and the image of Zayne's behind emblazoned itself into my eye sockets.
He had a great ass.
And from what I'd seen, he wasn't hurting in any other department either. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

But on the voluptuous stone of the Colorado Plateau nothing is ever as it appears. There is constant potential. The desert is not dried up and empty as if it might blow away like the seeds of brittle grass. It is the bones of the earth brought to daylight, half stuck out of the ground so that winds and flash floods constantly reveal more. Just as it is beneath our flesh, the bones are the sturdiest, most lasting parts. With their hollowed sockets and deliberate lines, they set a foundation upon which the flesh of forests, mountains, and oceans might accumulate. Only here, the flesh is gone, the last of it turned to dune sand. — Craig Childs

THE SKULL GLARED at me out of empty eye sockets. — Ilona Andrews

The boy knelt, shoulders bowed, on the sand in the grey of morning, moaning softly, fearfully. Glowing tendrils of energy streamed across the agitated sky, converging high above him in a vortex of brightness. He flung his hands heavenward and a sheet of blinding brilliance descended from the vortex. It enveloped him and from its core a pulsing sphere of light fell, entering his body and almost tearing him apart. He went rigid, screaming to shatter the heavens, his dark eyes bulging from their sockets, his mouth wide in a rictus of agony. Sirius exploded in a burst of silver-blue radiance, as his howl rose to a shriek beyond hearing and endurance. Out of the light and the sound and the anguish, two names imprinted themselves on his mind. One of them, he knew, was his own.
The other floated for an instant above his consciousness like a fugitive white dove in the morning. — J. Valor

Shale's answers were, for the most part, sarcastic. When asked what kind of rock it consisted of, Shale answered "petrified nug droppings." When asked how it was created, Shale responded with a long explanation of mother golems and father golems which Pharamond believed for five whole minutes. When asked how it could see through those points of lights in its eye sockets, Shale commented that it actually preferred tearing the eyeballs out of flesh creatures and using them instead - elven ones in particular. — David Gaider

All but Death, can be Adjusted -
Dynasties repaired -
Systems - settled in their Sockets -
Citadels dissolved . . . — Emily Dickinson

So it went. Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others. — Ron Hansen

On a dais in a London church, the Virgin Mary sits suprised by a rough crest of candlelight. The discomforture isn't in her expression but in the fluid form her carving takes, the way peaceful eyes rest in sockets that threaten to release them. Either the wood is eccentrically soft, or this sculpture remains a tree, alert
(despite careful varnishing and a wide, warning ring of sacred space around it)
to a propensity to burn. — Helen Oyeyemi

This was crazy, the world was upside down. He had to think of something to get the upper hand. After all, who was in command of this ship? He was going to have to pull out all the stops and show this halfling who was in charge. Using all his energy, he turned transparent, his skin sliding off, leaving him a skeleton, his eye sockets empty but for worms. It was no use. The imp of Satan was snoring softly. — Michael Phillip Cash

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer?" You know the answer, of course. — George Orwell

I look down at the city again. From here the city resembles a severed head, incinerated and discarded by the side of the river; its cavernous eye sockets are empty, bundles of dead nerves dangle from its neck, its shattered mouth gapes, a few desolate wires hang from its stark, scorched skull and, suddenly and incomprehensibly and so foreign to my body I could weep, I feel my heart expand with what I can only describe as a sensation of hope. Is there a word for that? Hope in the face of grand calamity. — Nick Cave

I've been on two tours. I've seen limbs blown off, bones protruding ... smashed, I've seen the incomplete bodies of children brought in and out of my helo. I've seen intestines on the outside of a man's body more than once. I've seen eyeballs hanging from their sockets. I've seen grown men bawling and begging for their moms to save them from the death they knew was just minutes away. I've seen horrible. The woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with died in my arms, and then again when I put a bullet in her brain. That was fucking gruesome. — Jamie McGuire

If anything is horrible, if there is a reality that surpasses our worst dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of manly vigor, to have health and joy, to laugh heartily, to rush toward a glory that lures you on, to feel lungs that breathe, a heart that beats, a mind that thinks, to speak, to hope, to love; to have mother, wife, children, to have sunlight, and suddenly, in less time than it takes to cry out, to plunge into an abyss, to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see the heads of grain, the flowers, the leaves, the branches, unable to catch hold of anything, to feel your sword useless, men under you, horses over you, to struggle in vain, your bones broken by some kick in the darkness, to feel a heel gouging your eyes out of their sockets, raging at the horseshoe between your teeth, to stifle, to howl, to twist, to be under all this, and to say, 'Just then I was a living man! — Victor Hugo

What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open. — Alice Munro

Yes, you crows, Once in a while There's a need for housecleaning, But not only in Nara. It's nature's way To make everything new again. So spring can rise from the ground, We burn leaves, We burn fields. Sometimes we want snow to fall, Sometimes we want a housecleaning. Oh, you crows! Feast away! What a spread! Soup straight from the eye sockets, And thick red sake. But don't have too much Or you'll surely get drunk. — Eiji Yoshikawa

Denise would never get over it. She knew that. Tommy's bones at the bottom of the well. She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photohgraphing them the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She'd clutched them to her chest. Run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There but not there.

Some part of her wanted those bones. Wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep. To carry his skull around in her purse so she'd be with him always.

She understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things. — Sharon Guskin

Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces. — Rob Pike

His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see he loved like a thousand bricks. — P.G. Wodehouse