Skull Quotes (page 4)
I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees.
Peter S. Beagle
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
Does he think to scare me? Arya kissed him where his nose should be and plucked the grave worm from his eye to eat it, but it melted like a shadow in her hand. The yellow skull was melting too, and the kindliest old man that she had ever seen was smiling down on her. "No one has ever tried to eat my worm before," he said. "Are you hungry, child?"Yes, she thought, but not for food.
George R. R. Martin
Look on beauty, And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight; Which therein works a miracle in nature, Making them lightest that wear most of it: So are those crisped snaky golden locks. Which make such wanton gambols with the wind, Upon supposed fairness, often known. To be the dowry of a second head, The skull that bred them in the sepulchre. Thus ornament is but the guiled shore. To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf. Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, The seeming truth which...
William Shakespeare
And your students,” Sato demanded, “don’t find it unnerving that Masons meditate with skulls and
scythes?”
“No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in
front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture’s symbols is a common root of
prejudice
Dan Brown
Then the anguish increased to unendurable massivity and nightmare dimensions, making her scream and vomit. She wanted...to have her dark curls shaved to an aquamarine prickle, because they grew into her porous skull and curled inside. Jigsaw pieces of sky or wall came apart, no matter how delicately put together, but a careless jolt or a nurse's elbow can disturb so easily those lightweight fragments which became incomprehensible blancs of anonymous objects, or the blank backs of 'Scrabble'...
Vladimir Nabokov
Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?'
'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse...
Anne Bronte
Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On....
Samuel Beckett