Skeletons Quotes - Page 3

• Everyone's got skeletons in their closet, and I've got a million in mine, believe me. I tested the envelope; I pushed it. Whenever somebody in authority told me not to do something, I did it just to find out why they said not to do it.

  Denis Leary

  Believe, Envelopes, Authority

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• Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.

  Chinua Achebe

  Laughter, Thinking, Mosquitoes

  Chinua Achebe (1996). “Things Fall Apart”, p.53, Heinemann

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• But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

  Isaac Marion

  Eye, Giving, Looks

  Isaac Marion (2016). “Warm Bodies and The New Hunger: A Special 5th Anniversary Edition”, p.161, Simon and Schuster

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• The cat which isn't let out of the bag often becomes a skeleton in the cupboard.

  Geoffrey Madan

  Cat, Bags, Cupboards

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• Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Bridges, Iron, Frost

  Christopher Isherwood (1963). “The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris [and] Goodbye to Berlin”, p.186, New Directions Publishing

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• She’s not… She’s not datin’ the skeleton, is she? How would that be even possible, let alone… nice? He’s got no skin, or lips, or… or nothin’.

  Derek Landy

  Nice, Skins, Lips

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• Without the emotion and willingness of Spirit, our music becomes dry and dusty—without life. Without doctrinal bones as a skeleton, the Body is not enfleshed in a healthy way.

  Marva Dawn

  Healthy, Dry, Body

  Marva J. Dawn (2015). “How Shall We Worship?: Biblical Guidelines for the Worship Wars”, p.8, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• I find in the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in the wild duck; and this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less, and walking more, than its wild parents.

  Charles Darwin

  Change, Science, Wings

  Charles Darwin (2010). “The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text”, p.83, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.

  Donald Johanson

  Hands, Legs, Arms

  "The Quest for Human Origins". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. January 25, 1991.

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• The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Country, Lying, Moving

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• A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets.

  Sol Stein

  Jobs, People, Lawyer

  Sol Stein (2005). “Other People”, p.168, iUniverse

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• The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.

  Piet Oudolf

  Flower, Important, Plant

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• Hunting after happiness is like hunting after a lost sheep in the wilderness--when you find it, the chances are that it is a skeleton.

  Josh Billings

  Happiness, Hunting, Sheep

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• The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

  Mark Haddon

  Lying, Mean, Eye

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• He it was that first gave to the law the air of a science. He found it a skeleton, and clothed it with life, color, and complexion: he embraced the old statue, and by his touch it grew into youth, health, and beauty.

  Barry Yelverton, 1st Viscount Avonmore

  Life, Science, Law

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• The bottom line: If you want a happier family, bring those skeletons out of the closet.

  Bruce Feiler

  Lines, Want, Closets

  "How Easter and Passover Can Make Your Family Happier" by Bruce Feiler, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 22, 2013.

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• I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton."

  Mel Brooks

  Jobs, Home, Years

  "Mel Brooks Is Always Funny and Often Wise in This 1975 Playboy Interview". Interview with Alex Belth, www.thedailybeast.com. February 16, 2014.

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• With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

  Angela Carter

  Girl, Wall, Flower

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• Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.

  Alan Watts

  Sleep, Acceptance, Creating Life

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• A weathered skeleton
  in windy fields of memory,
  piercing like a knife.

  Matsuo Basho

  Memories, Knives, Piercings

  Matsuo Basho, “A Weathered Skeleton”

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• In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Family, Flesh, Matter

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• It's not too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet with people, but to get the gold out is a different matter. That is therapy. Psychology is the Art of finding the gold of the spirit.

  Robert Johnson

  Art, People, Psychology

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• Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.

  A. E. Housman

  Mother, Lying, Son

  A. E. Housman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of A. E. Housman (Illustrated)”, p.67, Delphi Classics

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• History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
  A thousand and one remains a thousand,
  as though the one had never existed:
  an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
  ...
  emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
  nobody's place in line.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Running, War, Garden

  Wislawa Szymborska, “Hunger Camp At Jaslo”

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• [An artist] will sooner and with more certainty, establish the character of skeletons, than the most learned anatomist, whose eye has not been accustomed to seize on every peculiarity.

  Rembrandt Peale

  Character, Eye, Science

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