Skeletons Quotes - Page 9

• When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

  John McPhee

  Ocean, Moving, Writing

  "Basin and Range". Book by John McPhee, 1981; reprinted in his book "Annals of the Former World", 1998.

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• Hey," Dopey said when I was finished reading. "How come they never mentioned me? I'm the one who found the skeleton." "Oh, yeah," Sleepy said in disgust. "Your role was really crucial. After all, if it wasn't for you, the guy's skull might still have been intact.

  Meg Cabot

  Reading, Skulls, Guy

  Meg Cabot (2009). “The Mediator #4: Darkest Hour”, p.311, Zondervan

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• I clearly saw the skeleton underneath all this show of personality what is left of a man and all his pride but bones?

  Jack Kerouac

  Pride, Men, Personality

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• The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

  Tahir Shah

  Fire, Ghouls, Water

  Tahir Shah (2013). “Sorcerer's Apprentice paperback”, p.39, Lulu.com

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• Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts Wet processions Families walk Stunted boys big heads don't talk Look bony skulls & silent round eyes Starving black angels in human disguise.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Rain, Eye, Angel

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• Drawing is the skeleton of what you do and color is its flesh.

  Nicolas Poussin

  Color, Drawing, Flesh

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• It isn't easy to become a fossil. ... Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today - that's 270 million people with 206 bones each - will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That's not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found.

  Bill Bryson

  Mean, Science, People

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• The wind kicks in stronger, branches clatter. Or maybe skeletons. Bones of abandonment. Ghosts that will never be.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Wind, Stronger, Branches

  Ellen Hopkins (2013). “Perfect”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.

  Brian Eno

  Incompetence, Constraints, Composition

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• The laws of nature are the skeleton of the universe. They support it, give it shape, tie it together. Taken as a whole, they embody a vision of our world that is both breathtaking and awe-inspiring.

  James Trefil

  Nature, Taken, Law

  James S. Trefil (2003). “The Nature of Science: An A-Z Guide to the Laws and Principles Governing Our Universe”, p.7, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have no skeletons in my closet.

  David Vitter

  Conservative, Closets, Outrageous

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• Another boat, a straight-four, four sweep oarsmen without a coxswain, raced through our flotilla. I looked at them as they jetted past, and I quickly looked again. This boat appeared to be manned by four skeletons. Their cheek bones stood out like knots, their ribs were clearly defined as if they were painted on. Every leg and arm muscle showed as taut as steel cabling. Four pairs of deep-set eyes peered at us, conveying 'the look.' The four men who were rowing that shell were a special breed of oarsmen known as 'lightweights'.

  Brad Alan Lewis

  Eye, Past, Men

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• Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

  Dan Simmons

  Truth, Powerful, Glasses

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.239, Spectra

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• If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

  David Foster Wallace

  Real, Grieving, Worship You

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

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• Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Artist, Animal

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History".

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• The rum fiend would like to go and hang up a skeleton in your beautiful house so that, when you opened the front door to go in, you would see it in the hall; and, when you sat at your table you would see it hanging from the wall; and, when you opened your bedroom you would find it stretched upon your pillow; and, waking at night, you would feel its cold hand passing over your face and pinching at your heart. There is no home so beautiful but it may be devastated by the awful curse.

  Thomas De Witt Talmage

  Beautiful, Wall, Home

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• My curiosity was in no way cruel. Deviations from the commonplace attracted me strongly, as they still do; and to me the hermaphrodite and the living skeleton were interesting for the same reason as was Creatore, or the resplendent Guardsmen of the bands - because such people did not often come my way, and I hoped that they might impart some great revelation to me, some insight which would help me to a clearer understanding of the world about me.

  Robertson Davies

  Interesting, People, Understanding

  "I Remember Creatore". Essay by Robertson Davies, 1948.

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• Don't lie to your partner. Ultimately the expression on your face gives you away, and they feel betrayed by the lie. If this is the person you're going to be with - forever and ever, for better or worse - they will love you for all of your good and all of your bad. They'll love you for you. So open communication is key. I have no secrets and no skeletons in my closet with my husband, and I love that. I feel comfortable and at ease with myself when I'm around him. I love the woman that I've become with him.

  Vanessa Lachey

  Husband, Lying, Communication

  "Vanessa Lachey: 'I Love The Woman That I've Become With Nick'". Interview with Gerri Miller, www.yourtango.com. October 3, 2013.

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• After years of buying clothes I intend to diet into, I'll say this: the skeleton in my closet has some really nice outfits.

  Robert Breault

  Nice, Years, Clothes

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• I myself identify as a recovering Blockhead. You'd be surprised how many twenty- and thirty-something hipster chicks have the NKOTB skeleton in their closet, albeit artfully concealed by stacks of Ksubi skinny jeans and ironic Judas Priest T-shirts.

  Diablo Cody

  Hipster, Jeans, Ironic

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• Blackened skeleton arms of wood by the wayside pointed upward to the convent, as if the ghosts of former travellers, overwhelmed by the snow, haunted the scene of their distress. Icicle-hung caves and cellars built for refuges from sudden storms, were like so many whispers of the perils of the place; never-resting wreaths and mazes of mist wandered about, hunted by a moaning wind; and snow, the besetting danger of the mountain, against which all its defences were taken, drifted sharply down.

  Charles Dickens

  Taken, Wind, Snow

  Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit”, p.448, Cosimo, Inc.

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• They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.

  Jean Genet

  Grief, Book, Dust

  Jean Genet (2003). “Prisoner of Love”, New York Review of Books

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• There is a skeleton in every house.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  House

  "Punch in the East" (1845)

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• She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?

  Neil Gaiman

  Lying, Ocean, Moving

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• The apparent physical stability of reefs belies an underlying natural turmoil of growth, death and destruction of calcareous organisms. Much like a modern city, reefs are constantly being rebuilt and torn down at the same time. Corals are the bricks, broken pieces of plant and animal skeletons the sand, and algal crusts and chemical cements the mortar. Reef growth is determined by the production, accumulation, and cementation of all this calcareous stuff into solid limestone.

  Jeremy Jackson

  Nature, Animal, Cities

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