Quotes about bone
page 3

“I hadn't fully realized just how powerful words could be before this. Whoever came up with the saying 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' was talking out of his or her armpit.”

Malorie Blackman Noughts & Crosses

Source: Noughts & Crosses

Hurt

“Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.”

Jodi Picoult Salem Falls

Source: Salem Falls

“our bones
like stems into the sky
will forever cry
victory”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Victory, Cry

“A lady should never feel anxious about her behavior. The status is bred in the bone. To show anxiety is to lower oneself. Anxiety is.”

Eloisa James (1962) American academic

Source: A Kiss at Midnight

Behavior, Feeling

“If you died it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse.”

Sarah Kane book Crave

Source: Crave

“He stepped closer to her. "Thank you for saving me," he said softly, and wrapped the bones of his arms around her. Valkyrie smiled and hugged him back.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Dark Days

Smile

“Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Books

“he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Age

“As one old gentleman put it, " Son, I don't care if you're stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you're all right with me. It's the music we make that counts.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Music

“Soldiers are issued armour for their flesh and bones, but they must fashion their own for their souls. Piece by piece. (Itkovian)”

Steven Erikson (1959) Canadian fantasy author

Soul, Fashion

“I woke up, a bag of bones. Literally. They had gathered up my bones and put them in a bag and thrown the bag into a river.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

“McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry.

Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.

McGough: Really? When?

Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time…”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

Suffering, Time

“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

Water, Time

“I used to say that I spent half my life breaking bones on the rugby field, then the other half putting them back together in the operating theatre.”

JPR Williams (1949) Welsh rugby union player

JPR Given The Breaks - My Life In Rugby (2007), published by Hodder ISBN 9780340923085

Life

“Tombed in the solid night of starless space;
From nearest living orb so far removed,
That light, of all material things most swift,
Myriads on myriads of earth's years must speed,
Ere the mere outskirts of that Stygian gloom,
If ever, it might reach,-at rest eterne,
Lies the cold wreck of an extinguished sun.
Prime glory once of all heaven's radiant host;
Body, for soul of purest light most fit-
'Tween its first darkening, and eclipse complete,
Streamed years which might eternity appear;
While into ether, like the particles,
Invisible, which are the breath of flowers,
The mighty bulk its softer elements
Still ever was exhaling. As when flesh
And sinew of earth's monster Mastodon,
By the slow wasting of the elements,
All are dissolved, and hard, enduring bones
Alone remain,- even so, of this immense,-
When, by the ocean waves of centuries,
Millions succeeding millions, worn away,-
The adamantine skeleton alone,
In darkness, silence, utter solitude,
A ruin for eternity, was left.”

Edwin Atherstone (1788–1872) British writer

Israel in Egypt, Book the First (1861)

Soul, Flowers, Solitude, Light

“Get it down quickly, don't worry about the background. Just go for the tonal values. You see? When you look at it, and above all when you see how to render it as you see it, thats is, in such a way that its make the same impression on the viewer as it does on you, you don't look for, you don't see the lines on the paper over there, do you? And then, when you look at the whole thing you don't try to count the scales on the salmon, of course you don't. You see them as little silver pearls against grey and pink – isn't thats right? – look at the pink of the salmon, with the bone appearing white in the centre and then grays, like the shades of mother of pearl. And the grapes, now do you count each? No, of course not. What strikes you is their clear, amber colour and the bloom which models the form by softening it. What you have to decide with the cloth is where the highlights come and then the planes which are not in the direct light. Halftones are for the magasin pittoresque engravers. The folds will come by themselves if you put them in the proper place. Ah! M. Ingres, there's the man! We're all just children. There's the one who knew how to paint materials! Ask Bracquemond [Paris' artist and print-maker]. Above all, keep your colours fresh. [instructing his new protegee, the Spanish young woman-painter Eva Gonzales, circa 1869]”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Manet, recorded by Philippe Burty, as cited in Manet by Himself, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Little Brown 2000, London; p. 52
1850 - 1875

Children, Way, Light, Appearance

“Great praise must also be given to the Society of Arts for beginning the movement and carrying it on to the present time; and although the sphere of its action must necessarily be infinitely smaller than that of the Government Schools, yet we should always remember that the initiative of our great English exhibitions of industry came from the Society, and that it is to those exhibitions that we owe the stirring among the dry bones of industrial art which is now taking place.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 1 : Preface

School, Art, Time

“Doctrine is the frame-work of life; it is the skeleton of truth, to be clothed and rounded out by the living graces of a holy life. It is only the lean creature whose bones become offensive.”

Adoniram Judson Gordon (1836–1895) American hymnwriter

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 194.

Life, Truth, Clothes

“If you so much as touch him, I’ll have to smash every bone in your body—twice, to make sure I didn’t miss any the first time. I don’t recommend the experience.”

John Brunner (1934–1995) British author

Section 5 (p. 127)
Short fiction, You’ll Take the High Road (1973)

Time

“The bones… are given in a heap to a student who has no idea of a skeleton. Here is the defect which I am trying partly to supply…”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

Preface
A Companion to School Classics (1888)

Idea

“I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

letter to Clyfford Still, undated; as quoted in Mark Rothko : A Biography (1993), James E. B. Breslin / and Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 170
after 1970, posthumous

Life, Pain, Pleasure

“You that would last long, list to my song,
Make no more coil, but buy of this oil.
Would you be ever fair and young?
Stout of teeth and strong of tongue?
Tart of palate, quick of ear?
Sharp of sight, of nostril clear?
Moist of hand and light of foot?
(Or, I will come nearer to it)
Would you live free from all diseases,
Do the act your mistress pleases;
Yet fright all aches from your bones?
Here's a medicine for the nones.”

Ben Jonson Volpone

Volpone (1606), Act II, scene ii

Disease, Light, Strong

“I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards... I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"The Aleph" ["El Aleph"] (1945)

World, Housing

“Grief never mended no broken bones, and as good people’s wery scarce, what I says is, make the most on ’em.”

Charles Dickens book Sketches by Boz

Scenes, Ch. 22 : Gin-Shops
Sketches by Boz (1836-1837)

People

“To depart while seated or standing is all one.
All I shall leave behind me
Is a heap of bones.
In empty space I twist and soar
And come down with the roar of thunder
To the sea.”

Koho Kenichi (1241–1316) Japanese sangha of Rinzai school in Kamakura era

Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6

Sea

“The universe is female
Eluding the science of men
You sway and you swagger with your neat little dagger
You're gonna blow it again ….
I'll prove her existence in everything
The soul of her rivers and stones
Her acquiescence in everything
Her essence, her presence, her bones. ~ Essence”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

Men, Soul, Universe, Science

“Until this day the history of restoration has been the course of being beaten and recovering. Thus, history has been made by those who were beaten and persecuted. Go where people hate to be, and where people cry sorrowfully from the depths of their hearts. There lies the bone marrow of history.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

The Way of God's Will Chapter 1-2. The Heart of Restoration http://www.unification.net/wogw/wogw1-02.html Translated 1980.

Hate, People, History, Heart

“A dead man, Sir Moses,” Lord Darcy told him.
“Remember, young man, he isn’t dead until I say he’s dead,” Sir Moses said. He pushed Lord Darcy aside and stepped over to the throne. He stared down at Master Sorcerer Dandro Bittman.
“This man is dead,” Sir Moses said.
“Indeed he is, Sir Moses,” Master Sean said, coming up behind him. “And that’s something that neither you with your bone cutting nor I with my spells, nor the finest healer with the most sensitive hands in the kingdom, can do aught about.”

Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards

Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 15 (p. 151)

Dead

“The smaller the mammal, the more it is confined to smaller geographic areas. A small mammal is also more susceptible to subtle changes in climate and environment. …On average, the absence or presence of smaller species provides more precise clues to past conditions in an area than does the information gained from study of the bone assemblages of the larger animals.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Study, Change, Past, Animals

“I wasn't surprised that she crossed over to the Liberals. I don't think she ever did have a Conservative bone in her body. Well, maybe one.”

Ralph Klein (1942–2013) Canadian politician

Source: As quoted in "Welcome to Ralph's World: 10 of Ralph Klein's most colourful quotes" http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/welcome-to-ralph-s-world-10-of-ralph-klein-s-most-colourful-quotes-1.1216791, CTV News

Thinking

“It was indeed a dead grove, made up of the corpses of trees. Even the wood of these corpses was non-living, a deathly grey, silver-green, with peeling bark; and the bark had also flaked, shrivelling and simply sloughing off like dead skin. And arching along all the dead twigs, crawled a supple, clutching, lashing, bold convolvulus-serpent. It was her leaves which glowed a cheerful green on the dead branches, on all their agonizing bifurcations; it was her flowers which hung on the branches from clusters of tiny suckers and tentacles, astonishingly tender and serene. They were so alien to that austere and honest deathly sterility that they seemed almost dazzling. It was like an explosion of something splendid, like the sombre and magical secret of that dead river and its dry valley. There was something about that copse reminiscent of the hut on chickens' legs, or Koschei's hoard, or the field sown with dead men's bones.”

Yury Dombrovsky book The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

tr. Alan Myers, The Harvill Press, 1996, Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 100-101 cited and discussed in Peter Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom Under Totalitarianism, Routledge, 2000, p. 145 https://books.google.com/books?id=MoLCsjaQT08C&lpg=PA145&ots=ekC9_khOAS&dq=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&f=false The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1975)

Men, Secret, Flowers, Tree

“Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

God

“Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.”

Henry James book The Spoils of Poynton

The Spoils of Poynton.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life, Dogs, Art, Search

“How can anyone be interested in war? — that glorious pursuit of annihilation with its ceremonious bellowings and trumpetings over the mangling of human bones and muscles and organs and eyes, its inconceivable agonies which could have been prevented by a few well-chosen, reasonable words. How, why, did this unnecessary business begin? Why does anyone want to read about it — this redundant human madness which men accept as inevitable?”

Margaret Caroline Anderson (1886–1973) American magazine editor

The Strange Necessity (1969), part 1.

Men, War, Business, Reading

“What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

Silence and Awakening
The Inevitable: Contemporary Writer Confront Death (2011) Edited by David Shields & Bradford Morrow

Singing

“But inasmuch as that light is loaned,
insofar as we’ve borrowed bones,
must every debt now be repaid
in star-spotted, sickle-winged night raids”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Star, Light, Night

“Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum"
Ruins and Visions (1942)

Love, Children, Time, Sun

“In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

Love, Feeling, Waiting, Heart

“Miliband has acted strategically in leading the changes required in the three areas over which he has control: party organisation, the policy review, and his own leadership. In party terms, there is a far stronger emphasis on leadership development, and a greater role for organisers in strengthening and brokering the relationships necessary to re-establish Labour as a vital political force in people's daily lives. This is a neglected tradition, but the old bones are beginning to walk again. And it is not just an effective ground game: organising aligns campaigning with a better political position.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Guardian, What Labour Must Do Next https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/18/ed-miliband-right-to-ignore-blair-centre-transform

People, Game, Change

“The next stop on Reagan's European tour after Bitburg was Madrid, where he made a speech in which he said, "I know there's been a lot of controversy about the United States and Spain at that time, indeed some Americans once came here to fight in the civil war." He said, "But the thing is," said Reagan, "they were on the wrong side." In other words a conscious choice, a conscious and deliberate remark showing that the sympathy for fascism, not accidental, not anecdotal, not a slip of the tongue, but something bred-in-the-bone; and, I think, also worth recalling.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s

War, Thinking, Time, Fight

“The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

The She-Ancient, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Death, Dreams

“Mr. Hellfrick was an atheist, retired from the army, living on a meager pension, scarcely enough to pay his liquor bills, even though he purchased the cheapest gin on the market. He lived perpetually in a grey bathrobe without a cord or button, and though he made a pretense at modesty he really didn't care, so that his bathrobe was always open and you saw much hair and bones underneath.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“A bruise to the ego hurts more than a break to the bone.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 60

Hurt

“A “shared choice” movement sees the fetus as the genes of a woman and the genes of a man; the flesh of the woman, the flesh of the man; the bone of a woman, the bone of a man; the responsibility of a woman, the responsibility of a man; the rights of a woman, the rights of a man. It desires a transition to equality.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 158.

“The dog won't bite if you beat Him with a bone”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

"Lowside of the Road", Mule Variations (1999).

Dogs

“[Engineering] is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolades he wants.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Excerpted from Chapter 11 "The Profession of Engineering"
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1929 (1951)

Life, Men, Money, People

“The dog had no name. For a dog to have a name someone must have him and someone must love him, and a dog must have someone. The dog had no one, and no one had the dog. The dog had only the silent empty countryside of the few houses. The dog had only the crumbs and cleaned bones he could pick up at the few houses. The dog had only himself, so the dog had nothing, and he was afraid.”

Meindert DeJong book Hurry Home

Hurry Home, Candy (1953)

Love, Dogs, Housing

“"Andruw Jones makes his bones!*" (Andruw Jones)”

John Sterling (1938) Sports broadcaster

Specific home run calls

“No rack can torture me,
My soul 's at liberty.
Behind this mortal bone
There knits a bolder one

You cannot prick with saw,
Nor rend with scymitar.
Two bodies therefore be;
Bind one, and one will flee.

The eagle of his nest
No easier divest
And gain the sky,
Than mayest thou,

Except thyself may be
Thine enemy;
Captivity is consciousness,
So's liberty.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Source: Collected Poems (1993), Time and Eternity, p. 198

Soul

“People have asked me to speak on being sick, and even specifically on chronic pain diseases. … And I don't know what to tell you, except this — this is something I have discovered. Your body is fighting to live. This is in your very blood, in your heart, in your bones — your body is trying to live, it's fighting to live — and don't give up without a fight, you know? Do what you can do. Figure something out. If you have to, fight with people to get help — whatever it is, but don't give up without a fight. You remember — mark my words — you are here — you should be here — stay.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Youtube Live? Album?" (3 November 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWapPazv0j4

Pain, People, Disease, Help

“War rages, horrid war
Even in our bones; our double nature sounds
With armèd discord.”
Fervent bella horrida, fervent ossibus inclusa fremit et discordibus armis non simplex natura hominis.

Prudentius book Psychomachia

Fervent bella horrida, fervent
ossibus inclusa fremit et discordibus armis
non simplex natura hominis.
Psychomachia, line 902; translation from C. S. Lewis The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, [1936] 1975) p. 72.

War, Nature, Rage

“Tonight a pair of cooing doves under red bridal curtains,
Tomorrow a heap of bleached bones like those of yesteryear.
[…]
One moment we grieve over a short-lived friend,
The next we are ourselves overtaken by death.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 14

Death

“From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

16 September 1902
Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 14

World, Time, Sea

“What does it matter whether millions of semi-brainless beings curse or bless my memory? It is equally one to me whether they hang my bones in chains like they did the bones of Cromwell, or build a pyramid of stone over my mouldering coffin. Today only do I regard. Today I know. Today is mine. Today I wish to be something.”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

Memory

“As to the navy, it is said the several commanding officers grounded on the beef-bones thrown overboard from their flag-ships, but this I do not believe.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 38

“A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Louis Andriessen & Jeroen van der Linden, "The Alphabet Song"
M is for Man, Music, and Mozart

“consider the big fists breaking your little bones,
or consider the vague bureaucrats
stumbling, fumbling through Paper.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

"Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg"

“But contrast the attitude of the Socialist Government towards their Bolshevist friends and their attitude to the great self-governing Dominions of the Crown. To the enemies of Britain, of civilization, of freedom, to those who deserted us in the crises of the war—smiles, compliments, caresses, cash. But for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, who sent their brave men to fight and die by scores of thousands, who never flinched and never wearied, who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh—to them nothing but frigid repulsion. Our bread for the Bolshevist serpent; our aid for the foreigner of every country; our favours for the Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans, on whom the future of the British island and nation depends, only the cold stones of indifference, aversion, and neglect. (Cheers.) That is the policy with which the Socialist Government confronts us, and against that policy we will strive to marshal the unconquerable might of Britain.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men, War, World, Smile

“Death's dry bones glowed with light in the erotic dark
but he woke not nor felt the two warm bodies merge;
the male worm then took heart and in his wife's ear whispered:
"With one sweet kiss, dear wife, we've conquered conquering Death!"”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Orpheus' song, Book III, line 178
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

Death, Kiss, Light, Heart

“On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he (Sigismund) turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 542

Dead

“Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all
over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.”

Thomas Lux (1946–2017) American poet

"A Little Tooth", in Líneas conectadas. Nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos. April Lindner, Editor. Sarabande Books, Louisville, Kentucky. ISBN 978-1-932-51121-5

Love, Way, Learning, Baby

“The bare bones of my life are almost unbearable. I was born during the First World War. I spent my adolescence in the Depression, and when I came of age, I was involved in the Second World War. That sounds a pretty horrible series of events. They seem perfectly natural to me. I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe. And the Second World War was a wonderful thing to be with. It's now called "the Good War." We usually referred to it as "this damned war."”

Shelby Foote (1916–2005) Novelist, historian

We didn't think of it as a good war. We did believe it was fought in a good cause.
Interview for the Academy of Achievement, 1999

Life, War, People, Age

“Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

as "Jeff Christie" on a top-40 music program in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, quoted in * Mouth at Work 1990-10-08 Richard Gehr Newsday Recalling a stint as an "insult-radio" DJ in Pittsburgh, he admits feeling guilty about, for example, telling a black listener he could not understand to "take that bone out of your nose and call me back."; also in [The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, New Press, 1995-05-01, 49, 156584260X, 31782620, 15840895W], and Bone Voyage, Snopes.com, 2007-09-04 http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/limbaugh.asp,

“The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"The Knight's Tomb" (c. 1817)

Soul

“Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien — the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive — tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (p. 183).

God, Dreams, Music, Sense

“And when their bones into confusion fall,
Say ye, who knew the living man by sight,
Which is the villein now and which the knight?”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Wer kan den hêrren von dem knehte gescheiden,
swâ er ir gebeine blôzez fünde,
het er ir joch lebender künde?
"Swer âne vorhte, hêrre got", line 10; translation by I. G. Colvin, from James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (eds.) The Portable Medieval Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) p. 194.

“Jobs: As a kid, I read an article in the Scientific American. It measured the efficiency of locomotion of various species on the planet. Bears. Chimpanzees. Raccoons. Birds. Fish. How many kilo-calories per kilometer did they spend to move? Humans were measured too. And the condor won. It was the most efficient. Humankind came in with an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle. We blew away the condor. Off the charts.
This really had an impact on me. Humans are tool builders. We build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We ran an ad for this once that the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. I believe that with every bone in my body.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1990s

Way, Bird, Fish, Reading

“To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

Rage and the Pride">

Death, Women, Men, God

“Right after Andy died, we [Soundgarden] went to Europe, and it was horrible, because I couldn't talk about it, and there was no one who had loved him around. I wrote two songs, "Reach Down" and "Say Hello 2 Heaven". That was pretty much how I dealt with it. When we came back, I recorded them right away. They seemed different from what Soundgarden naturally does, and they seemed to fit together. They seemed like music he would like. I got the idea to release them as a single, and to get at least Stone and Jeff, or all of Love Bone, to play on it. I had the idea for a couple days, then, with an artist's lack of self-confidence, I decided it was a stupid idea. Somehow those guys heard the tape, and they were really, really excited. Stone and Jeff and our drummer, Matt, had been working on a demo for what ended up being Pearl Jam, so we had the idea that we would make an EP or a record, and maybe even do some of Andy's solo songs.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Temple of the Dog Era

Love, Stupidity, Music, Guy

“People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,—that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.”

John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) American author

Source: Practical Agitation (1900), Chapter 7

Love, Hate, People, Dogs

“Old Rover in his moss-greened house
Mumbles a bone, and barks at a mouse.”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Summer Evening.

Housing

“People (and animals) living under the canopy would live longer and grow bigger. Fossils of giant animals have been found too. For example: Six-foot beavers, 1500-pound guinea pigs, fifteen-foot-tall camels, ten-foot tall kangaroos, and fifty-foot-long crocodiles! Since reptiles never stop growing, they would grow to be huge under this canopy! I believe the dinosaur bones we find today were from giant lizards that lived under the canopy and then drowned in the Flood.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 46

People, Animals

“The time comes to every dog when it ceases to care for people merely for biscuits or bones, or even for caresses, and walks out of doors. When a dog really loves, it prefers the person who gives it nothing, and perhaps is too ill ever to take it out for exercise, to all the liberal cooks and active dog-boys in the world.”

Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) Irish writer, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading suffragette

The Confessions of a Lost Dog https://books.google.it/books?id=uNgBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA3 (London: Griffith & Farran, 1867), pp. 15-16.

Love, People, World, Dogs

“He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.”

Charles Churchill (satirist) (1731–1764) British poet

The Rosciad (1761), line 322

“I am too sick to work and haven't money enough to last 2 months and pay income tax. I want to keep going but do not see quite how, and there is no alternative - rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my "coming back on her, sick", I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not be here to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Diary (sick and depressed) (December 9, 1933).

Money

“Let any man show the world that he feels
Afraid of its bark and ’t will fly at his heels:
Let him fearlessly face it, ’t will leave him alone:
But ’t will fawn at his feet if he flings it a bone.”

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) English statesman and poet

Part ii, canto vii.
Lucile (1860)

World, Feeling, Flying

“Dry bones make good flutes”

Avner Strauss (1954) Israeli musician

The Hollow Flute, from "Voices Within The Ark" Howard Schwartz, Jewish Poets, [ISBN 978-0380761098].

“We are covered in blood, girl. You know both our forefathers were slaves. Let us hope they've found mercy in their bone-filled graves.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), Precious Angel

Hope, Girl

“A holy man will follow after purity of heart. He will dread all filthiness and uncleanness of spirit, and seek to avoid all things that might draw him into it. He knows his own heart is like tinder, and will diligently keep clear of the sparks of temptation. Who shall dare to talk of strength when David can fall? There is many a hint to be gleaned from the ceremonial law. Under it the man who only touched a bone or a dead body or a grave or a diseased person became at once unclean in the sight of God.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots (first published 1879).

God, Disease, Law, Heart

“Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 2

Law, Sex, Failure, Nature

“Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive or be he dead
I'll have his bones to grind my bread.”

Joseph Jacobs book English Fairy Tales

said by the ogre or giant. Now rendered as I'll grind his bones to make my bread.
English Fairy Tales (1890), Preface to English Fairy Tales, Jack and the Beanstalk

Dead

“The woman is perfected
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"Edge" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/edge.html Ariel (1965)

Sadness, Smile, Flowers, Perfection

“The geometry of innocence flesh on the bone
Causes Galileo’s math book to get thrown
At Delilah who sits worthlessly alone
But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Tombstone Blues

Books, Tear, Laughter

“4795. The Tongue breaketh the Bone, tho' it hath none it self.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1740) : Man's tongue is soft, and bone doth lack; Yet a stroke therewith may break a man's back.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Preface
1900s, John Bull's Other Island (1907)

Thinking

“He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.162

Love, Death, World, Sadness

“Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

"Susan Cain: Quiet revolutionary" speaker profile at TED.com, February 2012 (est.)

People

“You could try and breed territoriality out of the bone, but like a bad fairy it popped up again and again in all sorts of guises and from all kinds of DNA. As long as there was plenty, then everyone was happy to pay culture its due, but as soon as there was trouble—bang, out came the demonization memes and, lo and behold, they were back to the Dark Ages faster than you could say “mattock.””

Justina Robson book Natural History

Source: Natural History (2003), Chapter 8 “Briefing” (p. 101)

Happiness, Age

“If it came on the evening news tonight that there were five grizzly bears roaming around Cobb County, do you know what would happen by six o'clock in the morning? They would all be dead. Because every redneck in four states would be out there with a rifle, trying to shoot one, right? And whoever could shoot the biggest one would be a hero. They would have his picture on the front page, "Bubba shot the Grizzly Bear" and saved the village. That is exactly what happened to the dragons. If you could figure out a way to kill a dragon, they would be telling stories about you around the campfire. People killed dragons for meat, because they were a menace, to prove that you were a hero, or to prove that you are superior, in competition for land, or for medicinal purposes. Many ancient recipes call for dragon blood, dragon bones, dragon saliva, why? Gilgamesh is famous for slaying a dragon. A Chinese legend tells about a guy named Yu that surveyed the land of China. It says, that after the Flood he surveyed the land, he divided it off into sections. He built channels to drain water off to sea and make the land livable again. Many snakes and dragons were driven from the marshlands. You know that's normal that if you want to build a city. You have to drive off the dragons, then build your city. It was expected that you have got to drive the dragons away or kill them. Why would the Chinese calendar have eleven real animals: the pig, the duck, the dog, and … the dragon? Why would they put just one "mythical" animal in there? Could it be at the time they that they came up with these animals there were 12 real animals? There is one of the oldest pieces of pottery on Planet Earth. It's a piece of slate from Egypt; the first dynasty of United Egypt. It shows long necked dragons […] Why would they put long necked dinosaurs on pottery 3,800 years ago? Here are two long necked dinosaurs with a sheep in between them in their mouths. Here is a hippo tusk from the twelve century B. C., showing an animal with a long neck, and a long tail. Here's a cylinder seal, showing what appears quite obviously to be a long neck dinosaur. The Bible talks about a fiery flying serpent, in Isaiah 14.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

People, Dogs, Way, Guy

“The sand as white
as old bones, the pine trees
strangely red where the sun comes down.
I cannot say if it is our love,
or the day, that is ending.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Departures (1964), translated by Michael Cuanach http://web.archive.org/20041217155724/members.tripod.com/~Cuanach/anna.html

Love, Tree, Sun

“When people look of non-avian dinosaur they’re thinking of extrapolating a cow up to that size. Mammals are much much denser than birds are, because a lot of the skeletons of sauropods (the big, long-necked ones—Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus and the like) and theropod dinosaurs are just air. Theropods don’t have solid bones like we do; they have hollow bones. Sauropods don’t, but they have tremendous air sacs that fill up a lot of their bodies. And thus they weigh way less than a mammal scaled up to that size.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in "How Dinosaurs Loved: An Interview with Dr. Mark Norell on Dino Relations" http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/t-rexxx-how-dinosaurs-lived-loved-and-tasted-q-a-with-dr-mark-norell-american-museum-of-natural-history, Vice (March 20, 2012)

People, Way, Bird, Thinking

“The king may or may not be an oppressor. If he is not an oppressor, then no matter. If he is a tyrant, it is necessary to give him advice and counsel. It is incumbent to avoid him. It is not permitted to harm him, except at that time when all the people have turned against him and he has no way to flee. At that time, that leader is like a rapacious beast that will rend human beings limb from limb and crush their bones. Naturally, expelling him from his position is necessary, but without harming him.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Treatise on Kingship

People, Way, Nature, Time

“I haven't got a racist bone in my little finger.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

Cryptic response to claims that he is a racist

“There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commenses, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour […] our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection with space becomes as solid as bone.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Feeling, Star, Sense

“The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”

Cormac McCarthy book Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain (1998)

Secret, Youth, Age, World

“It's an amazing feeling to know that life is actually growing inside your body. The first time you see the ultrasound and you see the little bones and you realise that it's part of you and it's in your care is life changing and this sort of protective instinct has taken over.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

On being pregnant with her first child — reported in Lawrie Masterson (October 21, 2007) "Yummy working mummy", Sunday Herald Sun, Section: IE, p. 3.

Life, Feeling, Change, Time

“I was a Yorkshire miner's son, the youngest of seven, and my mother was no longer so very young. She suffered from bad rheumatism in the back and would often say to me in winter, when I came home from school: 'Henry, boy, come and rub my back.' Then I would massage her back with liniment. When I came to model this figure [for his sculpture 'Seated Woman', 1957] which represents a fully mature woman, I found that I was unconsciously giving to its back the long-forgotten shape of the one that I had so often rubbed as a boy. Not just her shoulder but her whole back down from the shoulder blades with the skin close to the bone, to the fleshy lower parts. I had a strong sense of contrast between bone and flesh. I was seven or eight at the time [c. 1906].”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore, 1978; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 32-33
1970 and later

School, Home, Boy, Sense

“You go watch the geek, who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak, and says, how does it feel to be such a freak?, and you say, impossible as he hands you a bone.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Ballad of a Thin Man

Feeling