The Skull Quotes & Sayings

My sister Rose lives on the mantelpiece.
Well, some of her does.
A collarbone, two ribs, a bit of skull, and a little toe. — Annabel Pitcher

She was shaking so badly that she tucked her hands into her pockets and clamped her lips together to lock up the words.
But they danced in her skull anyway, around and around.
You should have gotten Dorian and Sorscha out the day the king butchered those slaves. Did you learn nothing from Nehemia's death? Did you somehow think you could win with your honor intact, without sacrificing something? You shouldn't have left him; how could you let him face the king alone? How could you, how could you, how could you? — Sarah J. Maas

There were a lot of botched kills throughout the eastern part of Kentucky when the work fell outside his control. Six or seven years ago, a man from Perry County was shot point blank in the head and left for dead in the middle of downtown. Problem was, the bullet had traveled between the man's scalp and his skull halfway across his head and exited the same way it had entered on the other side. The whole thing had left him with only fingernail-sized contusions on both sides of his head. He identified the guy who shot him and saw him arrested and convicted of attempted murder.
Now, it's true that a situation like that was a rare one, but part of doing a job right was minimizing the chance for something to go wrong. — Sheldon Lee Compton

The ... experts of the FDA have declared Laetrile to be worthless ... quackery and fraud ... These experts are the professional descendants of experts ... confident that mental illness should be cured by drilling holes in the skull, the better to let the demons out ... This is the Orwellian fashion in which the medical establishment throws its weight around ... — James J. Kilpatrick

There are an estimated 100 billion neurons residing inside the skull with an exponential amount of neural connections — Michio Kaku

I felt my way up the cliffs to the south until I found a patch of machair a few yards long and a few wide, where I pitched my tent and settled to sleep. The stars stood sharp above. It felt odd to be on rock again, not sea, to think of the ground on which I lay extending down to the floor of the Minch. Lying there, I could still feel the day at sea, blood and water slopping about in my bag of skin, the tidal churn of my liquid body, a roll and sway in the skull. My mind beat back north against the current, thinking of the puffins' flight, the lines we leave behind us, the spacious weave, our wake, then sleep. — Robert Macfarlane

I shouldn't need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn't think to stop it? — Geoffrey Wood

Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it. — Mary Karr

Yes, she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer. — Michael Cunningham

All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone's face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone's skull. The power to make another person crazy with pleasure instead of fear and pain, to have every cell in another person's body at your thrall. — Poppy Z. Brite

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

Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man's best points. — Edna Ferber

It's either this or the vodka. Trust me; you don't want to drink the vodka. It takes half the flesh from the inside of your throat on the way down, and you wake up the next morning feeling as if a major portion of your brains are on the outside of your skull. Most unpleasant. — Debra Dunbar

When you die of sorrow it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That's sorrow. — Roberto Bolano

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies ? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here : lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps : damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus!* And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure. — James Joyce

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin. — P.D. James

The smile slid from his lips, and his eyes glowed with arousal. "I want you, Kiara. Not just today. Or this week. Or for the heat. I want to be with you." Fear and hope battled in her chest. "You don't even know me." He brought a cold, wet hand up to her face and twined it into her hair, cupping the back of her skull. "Then let me get to know you. — Milly Taiden

The creature spun, tumbling, then twisted round to face its attacker, rage blazing in its skull. — Steven Erikson

Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow cage must have been very light because she was not bent over, yet it towered over her head, with turrets like a Japanese pagoda. And full of birds: green and yellow, flapping about like dreams trying to escape from a skull. — Barbara Kingsolver

Good God!" Avery gasped at the bloody wound on Lucien's head and Cedric's grief-stricken expression.
"You were dueling?" Sir John growled. "Fools."
He relieved Lawrence of Lucien's feet to help carry the unconscious Marquess up the stairs to an empty bedroom.
The second Lucien was on the bed Lady Rochester burst into the room, fire in her eyes. "Is he dead?" she asked, panic creeping into her.
"The blow glanced his skull," Lawrence said. "He may still live."
"May? Oh, he will not die. I want to kill him myself and he will not deny me that."

-His Wicked Seduction — Lauren Smith

What kind of understanding?" he murmured almost absently, his mind clearly on other, more provocative things.
The trace of amusement in his voice irritated her, as if he were merely humoring her. Savannah pushed at the solid wall of his chest to put a few inches between them. His large frame didn't budge, and she was locked in by his arm. She pushed at him again. "Forget it."
He bent his head to taste the vulnerable line of her neck, to feel her pulse in the warm, moist cavern of his mouth. His blood surged and pounded. Little jackhammers began to beat at his skull. "I am listening to every word you say, ma petite," he murmured, lost in her softness, in the scent of her. He wanted her with every fiber of his being, every cell in his body. "I could repeat each word verbatim, if you desire. — Christine Feehan

Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? — William Shakespeare

Visitors say, 'Real shrunken heads! Wow! How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!' But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England? Once you start to answer that question, you realize that shrunken heads like these are a product as much of European curiosity, European taste and European purchasing power as they are of an archaic tribal custom. It is time to turn the spotlight round and point it back at people like you and me, and at our ancestors, who were responsible for bringing hundreds of these heads into museums and people's homes and who delighted in them as much as -- if not more than -- the people who created them in the first place. After all, it is not the Shuar who are pressing their noses to the glass of an exhibition case in an Oxford University museum. — Frances Larson

The darkness gets bigger; it's pushing at the edges of my skull, clouding my vision. I grab Evie by the hand and start to drag her inside. She protests vociferously. — Paula Hawkins

For a while, my self-control and my power of reason quailed to uselessness. — Kaoru Kurimoto

You could practically see the neurons firing in the kid's skull. His body was all spring and torque, a bundle of fast-twitch muscles that exuded faint floral whiffs of ripe pear. So much perfection in such a compact little person - Billy had to tackle him from time to time, wrestle him squealing to the ground just to get that little rascal in his hands, just your basic adorable thirty-month old with big blue eyes clear as chlorine pools and Huggies poking out of his stretchy-waist jeans. So is this what they meant by the sanctity of life? — Ben Fountain

Urge to come to terms with the "Outside," by absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out, you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe within the skull, to rival the real. — Jim Morrison

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means "dead hand." Its definition is: "The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present." (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning. — James Alexander Thom

Am I identical to my skin? If not - and the answer is clearly no - why should the frontier between my outside and my inside be drawn at the skin? If not at the skin, then where does the outside of me stop and the inside of me begin? At my skull? Am I my skull? Am I inside my skull? Let's say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of places to look for me. Where inside my skull might I be? And if I'm up there in my head, how is the rest of me me (let alone the inside of me)? — Sam Harris

If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do. — Donna Tartt

Football helmets were first designed to protect against skull fractures, but users get more than skull fractures. We need to take a look at this to see if there is any way to improve safety. We need to set some standards, because the ones now are not protecting players to the highest level. — G. K. Butterfield

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a massive skull-like head. Its carapace gleamed like oil. — Christopher Paolini

Am I dreaming? The nightmares don't stop anymore, so it's hard to tell. They quite down now and then, but they're always here. Screeching in my head, the constant din echoes through my skull like the deafening clamour of giant invisible machines. Makes it difficult to tell where the world of shadows end and reality begins. — Greg F. Gifune

When I'd lost him the first time, before Culloden, I'd remembered. Every moment of our last night together. Tiny things would come back to me through the years: the taste of salt on his temple and the curve of his skull as I cupped his head; the soft fine hair at the base of his neck, thick and damp in my fingers ... the sudden, magical well of his blood in dawning light when I'd cut his hand and marked him forever as my own. Those things had kept him by me. — Diana Gabaldon

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives. — Hilary Mantel

The skeleton picked up the second skull, so worn as to barely be recognisable as such. The vertebrae fell and rolled like beads from a string. — J.A. Clement

The Nigger was a handsome, austere woman with snow-white hair and a dark and awful dignity. Her brown eyes, brooding deep in her skull, looked out on an ugly world with philosophic sorrow. She conducted her house like a cathedral dedicated to a sad but erect Priapus. If you wanted a good laugh
and a poke in the ribs, you went to Jenny's and got your money's worth; but if the sweet worldsadness close to tears crept out of your immutable loneliness, the Long Green was your place. When you came out of there you felt that something pretty stern and important had happened. It was no jump in the hay. The dark beautiful eyes of the Nigger stayed with you for days. — John Steinbeck

Doroga thumped a finger against his skull. Head got nothing to do with the heart. Your heart wants what it wants. Head got to learn that it can only kill the heart or else get out of the way — Jim Butcher

And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. — Umberto Eco

It was really quite flattering to think that minor damage to my skull could cause such a display of hydrotechnics, but at the same time it left me slightly uneasy about what my response ought to be. — Jeff Lindsay

How can she who had torn his heart open at the waterworks with her art lie now like a human in his arms? Or stand catatonic in front of bananas on Eastern Avenue deciding which bunch to buy? Does this make her more magical? As if a fabulous heron in flight has fallen dead at his feet and he sees the further wonder of its meticulous construction. How did someone conceive of putting this structure of bones and feathers together, deciding on the weight of beak and skull, and give it the ability to fly? — Michael Ondaatje

This explains so much," she said, clucking her tongue in mother-hen fashion. "You're compensating for this withered appendage."
Withered appendage? What the devil was she talking about? He shook his head, trying to clear it. Colin's dire predictions of shriveled twigs and dried currants rattled in his skull. Wide awake now, he fought to sit up, wrestling the sheets.
"Listen, you. I don't know what sort of liberties you've taken while I was insensible, or just what your spinster imagination prepared you to see. But I'll have you know, that water was damned cold."
She blinked at him. "I'm referring to your leg."
"Oh." His leg. That withered appendage — Tessa Dare

Headache!" Zeus bellowed. "Bad. bad headache!"
As if to prove his point, the lord of the universe slammed his face into his pancakes, which demolished the pancakes and the plate and put a crack in the table, but did nothing for his headache.
"Aspirin?" Apollo suggested. (he was the god of healing)
"Nice cup og tea?" Hestia suggested
"I could split your skull open," offered Hephaestus, the blacksmith god
"Hephaestus!" Hera cried. "Don't talk to your father that way!"
"What?" Hephaestus demanded "Clearly he's got a problem in there. I could open up the hood and take a look. Might relieve the pressure. Besides, he's immortal. It won't kill him — Rick Riordan

Oberyn wanted vengeance for Elia. Now the three of you want vengeance for him. I have four daughters, I remind you. Your sisters. My Elia is fourteen, almost a woman. Obella is twelve, on the brink of maidenhood. They worship you, as Dorea and Loreza worship them. If you should die, must El and Obella seek vengeance for you, then Dorea and Loree for them? Is that how it goes, round and round forever? I ask again, where does it end?" Ellaria Sand laid her hands on the Mountain's head. "I saw your father die. Here is his killer. Can I take a skull to bed with me, to give me comfort in the night? Will it make me laugh, write me songs, care for me when I am old and sick? — George R R Martin

Brian Turner writes as only a soldier can, of terror and compassion, hurt and horror, sympathy and desire. He takes us into the truth and trauma of the Iraq war in language that is precise, delicate and beautiful, even as it tells of a suicide bomber, a skull shattered by a bullet, a blade in a bloodgroove. — Andrew Himes

Everything changed, and eleven months later, here I was in the middle of the night with a gungho major, playing secret agent, hoping some Frenchie didn't put a bullet in my skull before I gave the Germans and Italians their chance. — James R. Benn

There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won't hear, can't hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no idea. He had no idea what she was. — A.S. Byatt

I wish I could understand the window in your soul. Mine has none such, but I believe in others'. It is as though mine says to me, You alone are damned. To you the daylight, to you the reality of what appears; for you the dead of Carthage will be dead forever, the pain everywhere the overmastering reality, the skull beneath the fairest skin always visible beneath the blue-veined temples, in the laughing teeth. To you, the lone and level sands covering human endeavor, the ephemerality of laughter. ... Only for others, the reality of human life, the game worthwhile as it is being played. Only for others, any kind of hope. Only for others, the window in the closed room.--or closed galaxy, it makes no difference. — James Tiptree Jr.

Wow, colorful. I think the kid's head plowed into me. He came at me like a mortar. Pow! Skull meets tits. Tits lose. — J.D. Robb

Also, SKULLS. Gosh you love SKULLS. There is a good SKULL at the heart of any mystery, haunting its EVERY PAGE. That is what you always say. Or at least, it is what you always HOPE. — Andrew Hussie

She saw an alien bearing down and clasping her to its chest, that long curved head raising, mouth sprouting the silvery, deadly teeth that would smash through her skull and free her at last from her nightmares. — Tim Lebbon

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

They watched her sit, holding the bundle up before her, the lamp just at her elbow belabored by a moth whose dark shape cast upon her face appeared captive within the delicate skull, the thin and roselit bone, like something kept in a china mask — Cormac McCarthy

It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing. Somehow it is now floating above us all. Listen: The skull is speaking. It is saying your name. It knows about you and your favorite flower and all about your tenth birthday. But it does not matter. You are not convinced. For some reason, you are still full of doubt. You stare into the dark, looking for wires. Grasping for strings, you hold your hands out. — Joe Meno

A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent - the victim's head or your pan - then throw that pan right in the trash. — Anthony Bourdain

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories - with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe - but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread. — Ayn Rand

Hey, Dad, check this out!" Ike stared at the boy. He clearly wanted to be down there watching his kid possibly crack his skull open, rather than recording a song about how frightened he was that his kids might crack their skulls open. — Steve Almond

When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull. — J.K. Rowling

If you want an MMO, there are plenty out there. The difference with a single player game is that in the same way you lose yourself in a good novel, you can lose yourself in a single player story. You see it in all these games, where you can fill your house with turnips or decorate your armour with a dragon skull. — Marc Laidlaw

Marie clasped her hands together and looked vulnerable. Payne flinched. "The only time you don't tell me something is when you think it's dangerous, because being a fragile, sheltered noblewoman, I might faint at the thought of experiencing physical harm like a common person." She sighed, and seemingly from nowhere, produced an enormous cast-iron frying pan easily one hundred centimeters in diameter. "And then," she said sadly, "I have to damage one of the good pans by smacking it against your thick, common skull until you tell me - — Phil Foglio

You are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day."
For some reason the books of etiquette that Daphne's grandmother had forced on her didn't quite deal with this. Of course, silly people would say to babies, "You're so sweet I could gobble you all up!" but that sort of nonsense seemed less funny when it was said by a man in war paint who owned more than one skull. Daphne, cursed with good manners, settled for "It's very kind of you to say so. — Terry Pratchett

The regrets I have are so minor. You know, would I leave my Keith Richards hat, with the silver skull on it, on the stool at the coffee shop at LaGuardia? I wouldn't do that again. But overall, no, I don't have any regrets. — Hunter S. Thompson

The image in the glass seemed only vaguely familiar. I didn't like my new tie, so I took off my coat and tried another. I didn't like the change either. All at once everything began to irritate me. The stiff collar was strangling me. The shoes pinched my feet. The pants smelled like a clothing store basement and were too tight in the crotch. Sweat broke out at my temples where the hat band squeezed my skull. Suddenly I began to itch, and when I moved everything crackled like a paper sack. — John Fante

I would say that hardware is the bone of the head, the skull. The semiconductor is the brain within the head. The software is the wisdom and data is the knowledge. — Masayoshi Son

The inner censor of the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorizes his own conscience into submission;he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality. — Arthur Koestler

He knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, — Thomas Wolfe

Wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there's not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus - a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and — David Foster Wallace

It happened as it always did, swallowing her swiftly and completely. Intense. Painful. Quick, vivid colors spun beneath her eyelids. Sounds were sharp inside her skull. Fire shot up through her bones. She may have been screaming and she wouldn't have known. There was smoke in her nose, thick and black, and she couldn't breathe. It stung her eyes and licked at her skin. Wood and metal crashed down as skin blistered and popped and she knew this wasn't her, knew it was someone else, someone with a bigger body, bigger boots and darker jeans, and big ol' hands with scars on the fingers. Men's hands. Nails blunt and dirty with oil and grease and burning and- The cars were on fire. Paper burned and curled and rags ignited, the cement floor pockmarked by flash fires. Meat withered in her nose and she realized it was her. Him. Dancing embers blackened and burned bone. He screamed and she hoped she was not. He writhed and she really hoped she was not. He was dying, dead, and- — Angele Gougeon

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. — Salman Rushdie

I am of the opinion", Tharkay said, "that you ought not assign to free will something more likely the consequence of a sharp blow to the skull. — Naomi Novik

Reality is inside the skull. — George Orwell

He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
'Time is slowing,' he said in a leaden voice. 'Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall. — Norman Lock

The bullet will go through his skull, splashing warm blood and brain fluid all over. And from then on you'll have recurring nightmares of vivid colors and dead faces ... with their eyes popping out and leaking bits of brain. Are you sure you want to do this? — Minari Endou

Man's skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that sees in it. — Kazimir Malevich

I partnered you with Jim all those years ago because you were complimentary kinds of crazy. You kept each other in check. I need you to not crawl back inside your own skull and watch the world with binoculars from deep cover. — Warren Ellis

One thing that I really like to do is, I'll look in the mirror, and I'll imagine that I'm rapidly aging, until I'm just a skull. — Anna Akana

Our desire to segregate the mind's cogitations from the body's exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we're quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind's work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we're aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it's separate from the body. — Nicholas Carr

I suddenly see the world
as no longer viable:
you are out there burning the crops
with some new sublimate
This morning you left the bed
we still share
and went out to spread impotence
upon the world

I hate you.
I hate the mask you wear, your eyes
assuming a depth
they do not possess, drawing me
into the grotto of your skull
the landscape of bone
I hate your words
they make you think of fake
revolutionary bills
crisp imitation parchment
they sell at battlefields.

Last night, in this room, weeping
I asked you: what are you feeling?
do you feel anything?
Now in the torsion of your body
as you defoliate the fields we lived from
I have your answer. — Adrienne Rich

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly. — Cormac McCarthy

In glades they meet skull after skull/Where pine-cones lay
the rusted gun,/Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat/And cuddled-up skeleton;/And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,/And comrades lost bemoan:/By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged
/But the Year and the Man were gone. ("The Armies of the Wilderness") — Herman Melville

Marie's eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into women by evaporation, of women made into dugged swine. the fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, again, again, like a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream across the corridor to be caught in the claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight recoiling, rebounding, re-shuttling on down the inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with one last scream from all present. — Ray Bradbury

So when his tractor came to a smash-halt, the potato-digger rising up behind and then crashing back down, Bob was flung forward over the engine block and directly into the Dome. His iPod exploded in the wide front pocket of his bib overalls, but he never felt it. He broke his neck and fractured his skull on the nothing he collided with and died in the dirt shortly thereafter, by one tall wheel of his tractor, which was still idling. Nothing, you know, runs like a Deere. — Stephen King

while his skull gave him the general impression that someone had removed it while he had slept, and swapped it for one two or three sizes too small. — Neil Gaiman

On the shelves of her uncle's shop a jar contains the powdered skull of a suicide, a well-known cure for the falling sickness. — Karen Maitland

THE TRUTH OF THE VERY SMALL
When he is born, a baby's head is filled with the knowledge of space. The circumference of his skull is as infinite as the twirlings of the universe. His eyes look out with the blur of eyes which see for all species. He has remembered his own nature from past patterns. Now his heart beats through rock, sky, oceans. He feels the silence and the sound all around the world beneath his skin.
We all hold somewhere deep within us the truth we accepted in innocence. The seas, the forests, the soil, the atmosphere, are all vital parts of an ongoing system. By harming any part of it we must ultimately harm ourselves. It is that simple. — Jay Woodman

It's boring."
"Oh," I said. I rubbed at my jaw. "You think I should have gone four-color?"
Bob stared at me for a second and said, "I have nightmares about Hell, where all I do is add up numbers and try to have conversations with people like you."
I glowered up at the skull and nodded. "Okay, fine. You think it needs more drama."
"More anything. Drama would do. Or breasts."
I sighed and saw where that line of thought was going. "I am not going to hire a leggy secretary, Bob. Get over it."
"I didn't say anything about legs. But as long as we're on the subject ... — Jim Butcher

The neurosurgeon removed the right half of my skull. The swelling from the injury was so severe, it was causing enormous pressure on my brain, which if left uncontrolled would have killed me. — Amy Rankin

I have saved no one but myself and now I watch for the other universe to unravel in my skull, for the sky to become my own skin and fill with stars. — Will Christopher Baer

It rained; then it snowed, and the snow stayed on the paved ground for long enough to become evenly blacked with soot and smoke-fall, evenly but for islands of yellow left by uptown dogs. Then it rained again, and the whole creation was transformed into cold slop, which made walking adventuresome. Then it froze; and every corner presented opportunity for entertainment, the vastly amusing spectacle of well-dressed people suspended in the indecorous positions which precede skull fractures. — William Gaddis

You're not going to die?"
"Not right this minute." And of course, saying something like that usually resulted in immediate dying. I braced myself for a stray meteorite falling through the roof to crush my skull. — Ilona Andrews

Then the raw hunk of meat that used to be my enemy makes a sound, and I know where his mouth is. And I think the word he's trying to say is please. Pity, not vengeance, sends my arrow flying into his skull. Peeta — Suzanne Collins

Fear not, my doves!" Thorn jumped as someone flung an arm around her shoulders. The strange woman who had watched Thorn fight Brand a few days before thrust her gray-stubbled skull between her and her mother. "For the wise Father Yarvi has placed your daughter's education in my dextrous hands."
Thorn hadn't thought her spirits could drop any lower, but the gods had found a way. "Education?"
The woman hugged them tighter, her smell a heady mix of sweat, incense, herbs and piss. "It's where I teach and you learn."
"And who ... " Thorn's mother gave the ragged woman a nervous look, "or what ... are you?"
"Lately, a thief." When that sharpened nervousness into alarm she added brightly, "but also an experienced killer! — Joe Abercrombie

Rip her dress off!" Bob shouted. Bob the Skull takes paperback romances very seriously. The next page turned so quickly that he tore the paper a little. Bob is even harder on books than I am.
"That's what I'm talking about!" Bob hollered, as more pages turned. — Jim Butcher

An expense of ends to means is fate;Morganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the early 20th century the need to find this missing link became so desperate that an elaborate hoax was created. Piltdown Man ("discovered" in 1912) was believed to be genuine for over 40 years. In fact is was faked using a Medieval human skull, the jaw bone of an orangutan and fossilized teeth from a chimpanzee, and then "aged" by soaking it in acid and staining it with an iron solution. — Ellis Silver

Epic sex?" I sputtered. "By what standards, precisely, is sex judged to be epic?"
"And tons and tons of mortal simps like you used as pawns." Bob sighed happily, ignoring my question. "There are no words. It was like the Lord of the Rings and All My Children made a baby with the Macho Man Randy Savage and a Whac-A-Mole machine. — Jim Butcher

The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building. — David Eagleman

Her eyes widen and she shoves me back and then there's a space between us, enough to paralyze me with all of the things I could do to her next. I could raise my hand and hit her in the face or bring my knee into her stomach, take a fistful of her hair and rip it out of her skull. You don't get to do this when you're a girl, so when the opportunity for violence finally presents itself, I want all of it at once. — Courtney Summers

I love you, O'Reilly. When are you going to get that through your thick Aussie skull?"
He laughed softly, and she tilted back her head to look up at him wonderingly, "What's so funny?"
He put his hands on her shoulders and rubbed the tight muscles of her neck. "Do you realize you've never used my first name?" he said. "It's Patrick, you know."
He watched her lips curl into a smile that made his chest ache. "You've always been O'Reilly to me."
"Huh," he grunted. "Except when you're mad. Then I become Mister O'Reilly. — Candice Proctor

I guess a bit part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. — David Foster Wallace