quotes about Skulls
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The nails from a suicide's coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.
-- Aleister Crowley -
As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we're separated from the phsical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare ..
-- Alexander Gordon Smith -
There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.
-- Algernon Charles Swinburne -
Haven's warm, clammy palms press hard against my cheeks as the tarnished edge of her silver skull ring leaves a smudge on my skin.
-- Alyson Noel -
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Hail, high Excess especially in wine, To thee in worship do I bend the knee Who preach abstemiousness unto me My skull thy pulpit, as my paunch thy shrine. Precept on precept, aye, and line on line, Could ne'er persuade so sweetly to agree With reason as thy touch, exact and free, Upon my forehead and along my spine. At thy command eschewing pleasure's cup, With the hot grape I warm no more my wit; When on thy stool of penitence I sit I'm quite converted, for I can't get up. Ungrateful he who afterward would falter To make new sacrifices at thine altar!
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.
-- Amy Lowell -
No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.
-- Anne MichaelsSource : Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.10, A&C Black
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I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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I collect skulls; I think that a beautiful skull is a really good gift for a guy.
-- Bella Heathcote -
It is at night... that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull.
-- Brian Aldiss -
Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.
-- Catharine ArnoldSource : Catharine Arnold (2008). “Necropolis: London and Its Dead”, p.33, Simon and Schuster
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With various readings stored his empty skull, Learn'd without sense, and venerably dull.
-- Charles Churchill -
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Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.
-- Charles Kettering -
When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld.
-- Charles LyellSource : Charles Lyell (2005). “The Geological Evidence of Man”, p.61, Cosimo, Inc.
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A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.
-- Charles Stross -
Melancholy sees the worst of things, things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee -
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When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
-- Cynthia OzickSource : "Noted with pleasure". The New York Times Archives, www.nytimes.com. 1984.
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There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?
-- Danny DeVito -
I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.
-- David BenioffSource : David Benioff (2008). “City of Thieves: A Novel”, p.25, Penguin
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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 -
After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.
-- David Sedaris -
I don't mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it's got my name on it.
-- Debbie Harry -
He picked up the skull and knocked an onion ring out of its eye socket. "I see Sophie has been busy again. Couldn't you have restrained her, my friend?" The skull yattered its teeth at him. Howl put it down rather hastily.
-- Diana Wynne Jones -
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I see ... a pile of skulls and bones. For the first time since my arrival, what I see before me is too painful, and I break down completely. These are my relatives, friends and neighbors, I keep thinking ... It is a long time before I am calm again. And then I am able, with my bare hands, to rearrange the skulls and bones so that they are not scattered about.
-- Dith Pran -
Normally, we are happy to find a fragment of jaw, a few isolated teeth, a bit of an arm, a bit of a skull. But to find associated body parts is extremely rare.
-- Donald JohansonSource : "The Quest for Human Origins". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. January 25, 1991.
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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 -
Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.
-- E. M. Forster -
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The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.
-- Edsger DijkstraSource : "The humble programmer" by Edsger Dijkstra in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 15, Issue 10 (pp. 859-866), dl.acm.org. October 1972.
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We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.
-- Ekaterina Sedia -
I love prints of skulls and bones and have some taxidermy - a crow and a rabbit - to remind me of home. I like art and have a big portrait of Bjork.
-- Ellie Goulding -
The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull.
-- Eric Berne -
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Finally it has penetrated my thick skull. This life-this moment-is no dress rehearsal. This is it.
-- Fletcher Knebel -
She needed to get out of there. Her brains, thankfully, were still safely in her skull, but her emotions were splattered on the pavement.
-- Francine PascalSource : Francine Pascal (2003). “Sam (#2) and Escape (#26)”, p.13, Simon and Schuster
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I swear I have never told a player to attack another player. In fact, I have told my players if they ever hear me saying something like this, they can break a stick over my skull. I ask only that they play aggressively.
-- Fred SheroSource : HHOF Time Capsule - The 70s - Great Teams - Philadelphia Flyers, Hockey Hall of Fame, 1973-1976.
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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 -
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Silently, God opens his golden eyes over the place of skulls.
-- Georg Trakl -
That gal's all skull and no brains. She's like Joe Frazier with lipstick.
-- George Foreman -
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.
-- George Orwell -
We're doing Circle of Snakes, we open up with Skin Carver and we are throwing in Skull Forest later on.
-- Glenn Danzig -
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The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.
-- Grant Morrison -
Can you imagine any better example of divine creative accomplishment that the consummate flying machine that is a bird? The skeleton, very flexible and strong, is also largely pneumatic - especially in the bigger birds. The beak, skull, feet, and all the other bones of a 25-pound pelican have been found to weigh but 23 ounces.
-- Guy MurchieSource : Guy Murchie (2016). “Song of the Sky”, p.220, Pickle Partners Publishing
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Strike the enemy's settlements, turn them into dust, pave the Arab roads with the skulls of Jews.
-- Hafez al-AssadSource : "Six Days of War". Book by Michael Oren, p. 293, April 18, 2002.
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I think one of poetry's functions is not to give us what we want... The poet isn't always of use to the tribe. The tribe thrives on the consensual. The tribe is pulling together to face the intruder who threatens it. Meanwhile, the poet is sitting by himself in the graveyard talking to a skull.
-- Heather McHugh -
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Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain;— These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull...
-- Heinrich Heine -
A fully open mind could shatter the skull in both directions.
-- Henry Flynt -
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 -
Moreover he saw a skull floating on the surface of the water and he said unto it: Because you drowned others they drowned you; and those that drowned you will eventually be drowned.
-- Hillel the Elder -
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No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
-- Ian Mcewan -
If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.
-- Ivan Pavlov -
Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work.
-- James FreySource : James Frey (2003). “A Million Little Pieces”, p.287, Rutgers University Press
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"Godling? Demigod?" Lysis nearly howled. "You'd be beaten black and blue in Thebes, and staked out overnight for claims like that. In Sparta, the secret police would ambush you, violate you, skin you alive and use your skull for a drinking cup."
-- Janet Morris -
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Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.
-- Jeffrey Kluger -
I'm tired of being ruled by the Skull and Bones. The only place they belong are on punk-rock albums!
-- Jello Biafra -
I choose my battles, Dresden. Not you." She looked up at me calmly. "Let me put this in terms that will get through your skull: My friend is going to save a child from monsters. I'm going with him. That's what friends do, Harry.
-- Jim Butcher -
I kept a straight face while my inner Neanderthal spluttered and then went on a mental rampage through a hypothetical produce section, knocking over shelves and spattering fruit everywhere in sheer frustration, screaming, 'JUST TELL ME WHOSE SKULL TO CRACK WITH MY CLUB, DAMMIT!
-- Jim Butcher -
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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 -
The human brain is the last, and greatest, scientific frontier. It is truly an internal cosmos that lies contained within our skulls. The more than 100 billion nerve cells and trillion supporting cells that make up your brain and mine constitute the most elaborate structure in the known universe.
-- Joel Davis -
Getting punched in the face with a padded glove doesn't really hurt your face. It doesn't hurt your skull. The only thing it hurts is your brain. You can feel the brain injury happening. It's an instant headache.
-- Jonathan Gottschall -
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
-- Jonathan Lethem -
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Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!
-- Jonathan Safran Foer -
I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.
-- Jonathan Safran Foer -
The brain, or cerebrum, is a material entity located inside the skull which may be inspected, touched, weighed, and measured. It is composed of chemicals, enzymes, and humors which may be analyzed. Its structure is characterized by neurons, pathways, and synapses which may be examined directly when they are properly magnified.
-- Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado -
I try to neutralize my figures; I want them to be mythic and timeless. I want them to exist beyond time. I've used the skull caps or cowls to banish hair, which is distracting. I want to isolate the face and concentrate on what is really going on deep within my subjects.
-- Joyce Tenneson -
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I got to actually tattoo one of the members of The Misfits. The very first tattoo I ever did was this Misfits skull.
-- Kat Von D -
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 MalevichSource : "God is Not Cast Down". Book by Kazimir Malevich, 1922.
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It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.
-- Kazuo Ishiguro -
Rachel,†came a raspy voice from the upper level, and both Trent and I turned. It was Quen, wrapped in a blanket as if it was a death shroud, the black-haired intern at his side, supporting him. His hair was plastered to his skull with sweat, and I could see him wavering as he stood there. “Don’t touch Trenton,†he said, his gravelly voice clear in the hush, “or I’m going to have to come down there…and smack you around.
-- Kim Harrison -
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Her mind is a bird that's trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.
-- Lauren DeStefanoSource : Lauren DeStefano (2012). “Fever”, p.89, Simon and Schuster
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A theoretical physicist can spend his entire lifetime missing the intellectual challenge of experimental work, experiencing none of the thrills and dangers - the overhead crane with its ten-ton load, the flashing skull and crossbones and danger, radioactivity signs. A theorist's only real hazard is stabbing himself with a pencil while attacking a bug that crawls out of his calculations.
-- Leon M. LedermanSource : Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (1993). “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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I love these pet names," she said, gazing soulfully up into his eyes, "Nitwit. Sap skull. Termagant. How they make my heart flutter!
-- Loretta Chase -
What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.
-- Margaret Atwood -
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Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.
-- Mark Lawrence -
We ordinary people might lack your great speed or your X-Ray vision, Superman, but never underestimate the power of the human mind. We carry the most dangerous weapon on Earth inside these thick skulls of ours.
-- Mark Millar -
Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
-- Mark Twain -
You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.
-- Markus Zusak -
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Operating superficially, the mind is random in its activity and stale in its insights and images. However, with practice and experience the mind is freed from the skull, and the fresh and new can appear as though for the first time. It
-- Matsuo BashoSource : Matsuo Basho (2003). “A Zen Wave: Basho's Haiku and Zen”, p.18, Counterpoint Press
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We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.
-- Meshell Ndegeocello -
..when the first rubber ball smacked her in the head and made her brains rattle in her skull, she knew that something about this dodgeball game was different
-- Michael Buckley -
Band of Skulls is joining Cage the Elephant as my new musical caffeine.
-- Michael Koryta -
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I can never see fashion models, lean angular cheeks, strutting hips and blooming hair, without thinking of the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru.
-- Naomi Shihab Nye -
The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
-- Naomi Wolf -
I have a very large forehead. I have a pronounced skull. Maybe producers think that there is a lot going on up in there.
-- Neil Patrick Harris -
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Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.
-- Noam Chomsky -
I stare at him coldly. "I do not care for needlework." I pause. "Unless it involves the base of the skull.
-- R.L. LaFevers -
What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over.
-- Randall MunroeSource : "xkcd's Randall Munroe Defeats The Robot Apocalypse" by Alex Knapp, www.forbes.com. August 2, 2012.
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How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.
-- Ray Bradbury -
For me, 'The Crystal Skull' was something I'd never done before, and I loved every minute of it. Working with Harrison Ford as well - he's a cowboy from Montana, the most unassuming man you'll ever work with, fabulous guy, and I loved it.
-- Ray Winstone -
You should have seen the look on your skull...
-- Rich Burlew -
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In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Echoing the criticism made of his father's habilis skulls, he added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination made of plaster of Paris', thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.
-- Richard Leakey -
I fell in love with my wife twenty years ago. I am only now, it seems, getting it through my very thick skull how lucky I am.
-- Richard SchiffSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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Ever wonder what crime you committed that you are confined to a small enclosure above your sinuses, under permanent skull arrest?
-- Robert Breault -
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I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.
-- Robert T. Bakker -
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 -
Homeopaths do not have a physical brain, but merely 'skull water' with the memory of brains.
-- Robin Ince -
One half of my head, from the top of my skull to the cleft of my jaw, hammers, bangs, sizzles while the other half, serene and content, looks on at the agony next door.
-- Rudyard Kipling -