“The upper and lower ends of a humerus are like the brim and base of an urn. The shaft of the bone is like the belly of the urn. Fragments, even minute ones, of the detailed parts of a bone are like the indicator sherds of a broken urn. Fragments, even large ones, of the shaft of a bone are like the body sherds of a broken urn. Analyzing bones, after all, is very much like analyzing pottery.”

Source: What the Bones Tell Us (1997), Ch. 1 Everything You Wanted to Know about Bones (and More)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The upper and lower ends of a humerus are like the brim and base of an urn. The shaft of the bone is like the belly of …" by Jeffrey H. Schwartz?

Jeffrey H. Schwartz25

American anthropologist 1948

Related quotes

“Our wasted oil unprofitably burns,
Like hidden lamps in old sepulchral urns.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Conversation (1782), Line 357.

“While borrowing it is like eating a meal of milk and honey. When the loan is due to be paid, it feels as if the bones in the body are broken.”

Sarvajna Kannada poet, pragmatist and philosopher

Tripadis

“I don’t get why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every other bone in my body is broken too. ”

Jared Leto (1971) American actor and musician

“And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

Source: The Sound and the Fury

“Beauty in this Iron Age must turn
From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn
And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

"Beauty in This Iron Age" in Starlanes #11 (Fall 1953); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)
Context: Beauty in this Iron Age must turn
From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn
And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn
On whose gray surface runes are traced by a Norn
Who hopes to wake the Future to arise
In Phoenix-fashion, and to shine with rays
To blast the sight of modern men whose dyes
Of selfishness and lust have stained our days...

“Picture this:
A mountain splintering the sky like a broken bone, its western precipice plummeting onto jumbled scree.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Visitor (2002), Ch. 1 : caigo faience, first lines (p. 1)