Quotes about bone
page 4

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life, Death, Pain, People

“In the space between our houses
some bones have been discovered
but our procession lurches on
as if we have recovered… ~ Destination”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

Housing

“I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics
for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me.
The word and the thought are over.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"They Will Place There Telescreens" (1964), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

“In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Life, Death, Smile, Dreams

“You are the blood of our blood and the bone of our bone.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Scotland and Northern Ireland (June 18, 2007)

“As soon as this is over we'll go home
To plant the seeds of justice in our bones,
To watch the children growing and see the women sewing.
There'll be laughter when the bells of freedom ring.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

My Father's Gun
Song lyrics, Tumbleweed Connection (1970)

Women, Children, Justice, Home

“In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess. Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out. Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Pregnant Virgin (1985), p. 103

Life, Happiness, Children, Food

“Metaphorically speaking, free African-American politicians and activists are boiling the bones of their enslaved ancestors to make soup. The suffering of slaves is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"What Cultural Marxist Would Say About Looting, http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/what-cultural-marxists-would-say-about-looting/" WND.COM, September 14, 2017 2010s, 2017

Way, Suffering

“I am come to leave my bones among you.”

Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530) English political figure and cardinal

To the Abbot of Leicester, knowing that he was dying. http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/Bios/ThomasWolsey(Cardinal).htm

“"When the spring comes, we will manure the plains of Kosova with the bones of Serbs, for we Albanians have suffered too much to forget." — Isa Boletini, Albanian leader 1913”

Isa Boletini (1864–1916) Kosovo Albanian guerilla leader

Paulin Kola: The search for Greater Albania http://books.google.com/books?id=W_LV5RJe_EkC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=we+will+manure+the+plains+of+Kosovo+with+the+bones+of+Serbs,+for+we+Albanians+have+suffered+too+much+to+forget&source=bl&ots=MQwaOkg9JX&sig=3qDh_Av_qyDDgBO5XebnB9jTJ5I&hl=en&ei=XIWhTZ6MC4Tusgbwk7XyAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false. Hurst, London 2003, , S. 4. Page 1.

Spring, Suffering, Forgetting

“Chaco unquestionably had coyotes in town; coyote bones are common in the archeological sites of the inner city.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

p, 125
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

“The somewhere we're goin' to, and got to go to if we don't want to get wiped out, it's somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead! It's like to-morrow; when we get there we aren't there; we got to keep goin', and we got to everlastingly and eternally keep goin' – and goin' fast! If we don't, the Almighty hasn't got a bit o' use for us; He turns us right into dust and scattered old bones, and nothin's left of our whole country and our finest cities except some street paving and a few cellars with weeds in 'em.”

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) American novelist

The Plutocrat (1927), chapter 30 (Earl Tinker speaking to Jean-Edouard Le Seyeux)

Country

“Sheep were docile, yes, but vigilant. Unlike many people, sheep were always aware that predators existed and were alert for the scent and the schemes of wolves.
Contemporary Americans were so proseperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog.”

Dean Koontz book The Good Guy

Krait's musings
Source: The Good Guy (2007), Chapter 7, pp. 52-53

People, Dogs, Wolf

“Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

Sadness, Family, Nature, Heart

“In the restaurant, eyes / above a soup bowl's rim / Is it she? / Changes shape, is and is not. / Now she's spat out a bit of bone, / I don't think it's her, / I'm leaving, I'm done eating. / This is a long and mad journey: / I see her on the faces of others, my own.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

Thinking, Change, Madness

“Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty; he has need of its utmost devotion… She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

L'amour abstrait ne suffit pas à un homme pauvre et grand, il en veut tous les dévouements... La véritable épouse en cœur, en chair et en os, se laisse traîner là où va celui en qui réside sa vie, sa force, sa gloire, son bonheur.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part II: A Woman Without a Heart

Love, Life, Happiness, Heart

“As I plodded back and forth I reflected miserably upon my own political rootlessness, in a world where politics is so important. When I am with Tories I am a violent advocate of reform; when I am with reformers I hold forth on the value of tradition and stability. When I am with communists I become a royalist — almost a Jacobite; when I am with socialists I am an advocate of free trade, private enterprise and laissez-faire. The presence of a person who has strong political convictions always sends me flying off in a contrary direction. Inevitably, in the world of today, this will bring me before a firing squad sooner or later. Maybe the fascists will shoot me, and maybe the proletariat, but political contrariness will be the end of me; I feel it in my bones.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

World, Feeling, Strong, Personality

“Doctor Doom: Bereft of my technology… mystic armor damaged… offensive and defensive capabilities minimal. Enemy forces… [a horde of demons closes in] substantial. It matters not. Even cornered, to my last breath I remain who and what I am. I will not hide, nor tremble, nor beg. Let them come and reckon with fury that is DOOM defiant. Here I stand, hell-horde! Unbowed! But understand: If it is my destiny that I should perish this day, I shall not go down easily… and I shall NOT go down ALONE.
Demons: RIP its SKIN. Wear it for HIDE. Its EYES for me. Tear its FLESH from its BONES.
Doctor Doom: Yes, come, and let us make an end of it — there is DOOM enough for ALL!”

J. Michael Straczynski (1954) American writer and television producer

June
2006
J. Michael Straczynski
The Hammer Falls (Part 2)
Fantastic Four
537

Hell, Understanding, Tear

“The most barbarous fact in all christendom is the labor market. The mere term sufficiently expresses the animalism of commercial civilization.
They who buy and they who sell in the labor market are alike dehumanized by the inhuman traffic in the brains and blood and bones of human beings.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

Animals

“It is possible, in Iran, Greece, North Africa, USA, Mexico, Pakistan, and Australia to see how, in our short history of life destruction, we have brought the hard bones of the earth to the surface by stripping the life skin from it for ephemeral uses. We can, if we persist, create a moon-landscape of the earth. So poor goatherds wander where the lake-forests stood and the forest deities were worshipped. The religions of resignation and fanaticism follow those of the nature gods, and man-built temples replace trees and tree spirits.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 8.20

Life, God, Religion, History

“And what is the relationship of muscle to bone? Through its ability to contract or shorten itself, the muscle brings two bones into a new angular relationship.... The position of two bones toward each other must change if the muscle so decides.
Bones give support to the total organism; also when in motion.
Muscles have a higher function because they act beside each other.
One bends, the other stretches.
One bone alone achieves nothing.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

I.10 B, p. 28
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

Support, Change

“The corpses of water-dwelling animals often sink to the bottom and become covered with sediment. The sediment tends to protect the dead body and even at times retain an impression of its shape and external anatomical details. This environment then provides the means by which the bones of the skeleton are mineralized. …most land animals die and fall to the ground, without any chance of a freak flood casting them into an environment more favorable to fossilization.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Water, Chance, Time, Animals

“For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 62–66

Love, Error, Universe

“Nuto, who had never really gone away, still wanted to understand the world and change it, and upset the cycle of the seasons. Or perhaps he didn't, and still believed only in the moon. But I, who didn't believe in the moon, knew that when all was said and done only the seasons matter and they are in your bones and they nurtured you when you were a boy.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter X, p. 60

World, Boy, Understanding, Change

“The last words which I uttered on board of the vessel were those of Scipio—'Ungrateful country! thou shalt not even possess my bones'.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

As derradeiras palavras que na náu disse foram as de Scipião Africano: Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea!
Letter written from India (1553) to a friend at Lisbon, as quoted in Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens (1808) by Percy Smythe, pp. 16–17
Letters

Country

“It will not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part II, chapter 8.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“For the yearners know that the life of flesh is but the bridge to the fleshless Life. And the yearners know that the coarse and inadequate senses are but the peepholes into the world of the infinitely fine and adequate sense. And the yearners know that every flesh they tear they must inevitably repair, sooner or later, with their own flesh; and every bone they crush they must rebuild with their own bone; and every drop of blood they spill they must replenish with their own blood. For, that is the law of flesh.”

Mikha'il Na'ima book The Book of Mirdad

The Book of Mirdad (1948)

Life, World, Law, Sense

“I agree with you to the letter in all you say about Ireland. There is no doubt that the land question (coupled with the Church Establishment) is at the root of the evil. And here let me say that I go heartily with you in the determination to attack the land monopoly root and branch both here and in Ireland and Scotland…. Wherever the deductions of political economy lead I am prepared to follow. By the way, have you had time to read Bastiat's partly posthumous volume, 'Les Harmonies Economiques'? If not, do so; it will require a studious perusal, but will repay it. He has breathed a soul into the dry bones of political economy, and has vindicated his favourite science from the charge of inhumanity with all the fervour of a religious devotee.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to John Bright (1 October 1851), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 561.
1850s

Way, Soul, Question, Science

“The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding…The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Light, Rage, Perfection, Training

“Those unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts and brave spirits, reached, in their glorious career that last highest point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They died for their country.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, The Unknown Loyal Dead (1871)

Beauty, Flowers, Heart, Country

“Give a dog a bone, leave a dog alone. Let a dog roam and he'll find his way home.”

DMX (rapper) (1970) American rapper and actor from New York

"Ruff Ryders' Anthem" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpHtEa2II_s (1998), It's Dark and Hell Is Hot 1990s

Dogs, Way, Home

“I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.”

Theodore Roethke book The Far Field

"The Marrow," ll. 23-24
The Far Field (1964)

God

“Whenever you look, God is there. But is He a rock or a stone or a sun or a moon or a bone? No. His sound is there and His warnings are there. You can see Him. You can see His sound, His words, His speech. You can listen to the commandments given to the prophets, because they have not gone away. They are within us.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

God, Sun

“I've been blessed with playing the drums and having a young mind and staying healthy. I’m a vegetarian, I take good care of myself. I'll be the last Skynyrd standing. All those guys smoke themselves to death. They all drank themselves to death, drugs. … I still have stainless steel from the knee down in my right leg; I have bone against bone against stainless steel against nerve ending. Every step I take is painful, but when I play drums I push everything away, I get into the zone and I do what I’m supposed to do. … I play Lynyrd Skynyrd music because that's who I am. Everything else has been taken from me, my reputation, my world, my money has all been stolen from me by people that I thought loved me. However they can't take away my ability to play drums.”

Artimus Pyle (1948) American musician

"Rock Survivor: Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle keeps the music alive his way" http://tbrnews.com/lifestyle/rock-survivor-lynyrd-skynyrd-drummer-artimus-pyle-keeps-the-music/article_1c30bfee-1501-11e3-8bdb-001a4bcf887a.html, interview with The Beach Reporter (4 September 2013).

Love, Death, Money, Pain

“Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

As quoted in "Osborn States the Case For Evolution", in The New York Times (12 Jul 1925), p. XX1; the tooth was misidentified as anthropoid by Osborn, who over-zealously proposed Nebraska Man in 1922; the tooth was shortly thereafter found to be that of a peccary (a Pliocene pig) when further bones were found. A retraction was made in 1927, correcting the scientific blunder.

Men, Age, Idea

“All of you know I'm having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness. And I ----. It gets a little easier the more you do it. And if you have a family, an Administration, a Congress and a whole country to ask, you're going to get a lot of practice. But I have to tell that in these last days it has come home to me again, something I first learned as President, but it wasn't burned in my bones -- and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing to give it. And all of us -- the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you -- they harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self-inflicted wounds. And so it is important that we are able to forgive those we believe have wronged us, even as we ask for forgiveness from people we have wronged. And I heard that first -- first -- in the Civil Rights Movement. Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

On August 28, 1998 at Union Chapel in Oak Bluff, Massachusetts, speaking on the 35th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Published in the August 29, 1998 edition of The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/29/us/in-clinton-s-remarks-a-focus-on-interdependence-and-forgiveness.html?pagewanted=5 1990s

Love, People, Family, Home

“Treasury Secretary Brady didn't like the Fed either. He and the president were friends and had a lot in common-both were wealthy, Yale educated patricians and members of Skull and Bones.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

Source: 2000s, The Age of Turbulence (2008), Chapter Five, "Black Monday", p. 119.

Education

“Opponents of Fracastoro met his arguments by feigning imaginary causes, which differed from each other rather in name than in substance. Andrea Mattioli, for instance, an eminent botanist, the illustrator of Dioscorides, embraced the notion of Agricola, a German miner, that a certain 'materia pinguis' or 'fatty matter,' set into fermentation by heat, gave birth to fossil organic shapes. Yet Mattioli had come to the conclusion, from his own observations, that porous bodies, such as bones and shells, might be converted into stone, as being permeable to what he termed the 'lapidifying juice.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 29
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Birth

“He fell behind his brothers two or three inches in height, and proportionally in bone and weight. His character and processes of mind seemed to share in this fining-down process of scale. He was not good in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society — all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers were the type; he was the variation.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Love, World, Way, Boy

“Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Jelly-Bean"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Feeling, Season

“Poor devils! Where do these unfortunate creatures come from? On what butcher's block will they meet their end? What reward does municipal munificence allot them for thus cleaning (or dirtying) the pavements of Paris? At what age are they sent to the glue factory? What becomes of their bones (their skin is good for nothing)?”

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) French Romantic composer

Pauvres diables!... D'où sortent ces malheureux êtres ?... À quel Montfaucon vont-ils mourir ?... Que leur octroie la munificence municipale pour nettoyer (ou salir) ainsi le pavé de Paris ?... À quel âge les envoie-t-on à l'équarrissage ?... Que fait-on de leurs os ? (leur peau n'est bonne à rien.)
Les Grotesques de la Musique (Paris: A. Bourdilliat, 1859) p. 89; Alastair Bruce (trans.) The Musical Madhouse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003) pp. 54-56.
Of critics

Age

“Abu Hurayra reported that he heard the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, say, "The likeness of the miser and the one who gives is like two men wearing shirts of chain-mail from their breasts to their collar bones. When the giver of sadaqa spends, his shirt expands over his body until it covers his fingertips and obliterates his footsteps. When the miser wants to spend anything, every link remains in its place. He tries to make it looser but it will not get looser."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 4, hadith number 560
Sunni Hadith

Men, Peace

“As a little girl, I would always ask my grandmother what it would take to be successful in life. … She said all you need are the three bones: the wishbone, the jawbone, and the backbone. The wishbone would keep you hoping and praying because hope is the motivator, but the dream is the driver. The jawbone will give you courage to speak truth to power, lift your voice — it should matter that you’re in the room, that you’re in that space with that voice. The backbone … will give you courage to stand through all of your trials and tribulations.”

Nina Turner (1967) American politician

"Nina Turner: Leader of the American Progressive Movement," Democracy in Color, June 30, 2016 https://democracyincolor.com/nina-turner-leader-of-the-american-progressive-movement-c822ea458204#.wg5lytrc9

Life, Truth, Dreams, Hope

“This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

“In consequence of the great fear which fell upon Jaipál, who confessed he had seen death before the appointed time, he sent a deputation to the Amír soliciting peace, on the promise of his paying down a sum of money, and offering to obey any order he might receive respecting his elephants and his country. The Amir Subuktigín consented on account of mercy he felt towards those who were his vassals, or for some other reason which seemed expedient to him. But the Sultán Yamínu-d daula Mahmúd addressed the messengers in a harsh voice, and refused to abstain from battle, until he should obtain a complete victory suited to his zeal for the honour of Islám and the Musulmáns, and one which he was confident God would grant to his arms. So they returned, and Jaipál being in great alarm, again sent the most humble supplications that the battle might cease saying, "You have seen the impetuosity of the Hindus and their indifference to death, whenever any calamity befalls them, as at this moment. If therefore, you refuse to grant peace in the hope of obtaining plunder, tribute, elephants and prisoners, then there is no alternative for us but to mount the horse of stern determination, destroy our property, take out the eyes of our elephants, cast our children into fire, and rush out on each other with sword and spear, so that all that will be left to you to conquer and seize is stones and dirt, dead bodies, and scattered bones."”

Sabuktigin (942–997) Founder of the Ghaznavid Empire

Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume II, pp. 20-21. Translation of Tarikh-i-Yamini of al-Utbi.

Death, Money, God, Children

“Women will soon be able to make their own sperm using their own bone marrow. Is that unbelievable? How unfair is that for us guys, huh? I mean, all these years, we've been in charge of manufacturing and distribution, you know what I'm saying? We provide free delivery and installation…”

Jay Leno (1950) American comedian, actor, writer, producer, voice actor and television host

Monologue, 19 April 2007
The Tonight Show

Women, Guy

“History knew a midnight, which we may estimate at about the year 1000 A. D., when the human race lost the arts and sciences even to the memory. The last twilight of paganism was gone, and yet the new day had not begun. Whatever was left of culture in the world was found only in the Saracens, and a Pope eager to learn studied in disguise in their unversities, and so became the wonder of the West. At last Christendom, tired of praying to the dead bones of the martyrs, flocked to the tomb of the Saviour Himself, only to find for a second time that the grave was empty and that Christ was risen from the dead. Then mankind too rose from the dead. It returned to the activities and the business of life; there was a feverish revival in the arts and in the crafts. The cities flourished, a new citizenry was founded. Cimabue rediscovered the extinct art of painting; Dante, that of poetry. Then it was, also, that great courageous spirits like Abelard and Saint Thomas Aquinas dared to introduce into Catholicism the concepts of Aristotelian logic, and thus founded scholastic philosophy. But when the Church took the sciences under her wing, she demanded that the forms in which they moved be subjected to the same unconditioned faith in authority as were her own laws. And so it happened that scholasticism, far from freeing the human spirit, enchained it for many centuries to come, until the very possibility of free scientific research came to be doubted. At last, however, here too daylight broke, and mankind, reassured, determined to take advantage of its gifts and to create a knowledge of nature based on independent thought. The dawn of the day in history is know as the Renaissance or the Revival of Learning.”

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) German mathematician

"Über Descartes Leben und seine Methode die Vernunft Richtig zu Leiten und die Wahrheit in den Wissenschaften zu Suchen," "About Descartes' Life and Method of Reason.." (Jan 3, 1846) C. G. J. Jacobi's Gesammelte werke Vol. 7 https://books.google.com/books?id=_09tAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA309 p.309, as quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930).

Life, World, Faith, Law

“Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men. There, I've said it. It's my dirty little secret. […]
The other day, a very wise friend of mine asked "Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be an adequate woman?" A Roman candle went off in my head; she was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that there are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

The New York Times. Living Out Loud, pp. 26-27 (1988)

Love, Women, Men, Secret

“Where would one find an answer? For the belief—the will to believe—was engrained deeply in the human fiber. Not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 13 (p. 101)

Men, World, Soul

“Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture… black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Robert Motherwell, in a catalog note to the show Black or White (1950)
Misattributed

Animals, Drawing

“In reference to dealing with black issues and dealing with issues that plague those minority communities, Donald Trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body. I know what real racism is. And Donald Trump is so far from it. Talking to him and his wonderful wife and his children is like hanging out with some friends of mine that are black … He's just that kind of a person. He is not uneasy around you. He's very relaxed… When Donald Trump talks about 'the blacks' he's talking about the blacks, the group as a whole. He's talking about the groups… No, it doesn't bother me, because I know Donald Trump. I know who he is. I know he is not at all speaking in any derogatory sense at all. He's simply talking to that ethnic group, the blacks or the whites… Even with a sitting black President, the racial tension in this country is at an all-time high. And I believe it's led by the Democratic party and led by President Barack Obama, and obviously Secretary Clinton desires to continue that torch, which I believe will lead us more and more into economic destruction, especially for minorities in this country… I have not experienced racist tension from Donald Trump. I'm from the South. Literally right over the next county, there are active KKK groups that parade their rebel flag on a daily basis… This is in 2016. Right now, today, with a sitting black President. So I know what real racism looks like. And it is not Donald Trump… Does he want it (ex-KKK leaders endorsement)? He said, 'No, I don't want it, I don't accept it.' … He doesn't stand for any hate groups, whether it be a Christian hate group or an Islam hate group. He's already stated this. Mr. Trump has already stated that there was a technical issue in the earpiece. I'm in television; I own a TV studio. I do know how technical issues can cause you to miss out on what someone is saying.”

Mark Burns (televangelist) (1979) Christian pastor and founder of the NOW Television Network

Interview, New York Daily News, 15 May 2016 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/meet-female-muslim-mexican-american-trump-supporters-article-1.2637077

Hate, Children, Communication, Sense

“[Aphrodite] set out, and after searching up and down Olympus for her boy, found him far away in the fruit-laden orchard of Zeus. With him was Ganymede, whose beauty had so captivated Zeus that he took him up to heaven to live with the immortals. The two lads, who had much in common, were playing with golden knuckle-bones. Eros, the greedy boy, was standing there with a whole handful of them clutched to his breast and a happy flush mantling his cheeks. Near by sat Ganymede, hunched up, silent and disconsolate, with only two left. He threw these for what they were worth in quick succession and was furious when Eros laughed. Of course he lost them both immediately – they joined the rest. So he went off in despair with empty hands and did not notice the goddess's approach. Aphrodite came up to her boy, took his chin in her hand, and said: 'Why this triumphant smile, you rascal?”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

I do believe you won the game unfairly by cheating a beginner…
Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea

Happiness, Smile, Beauty, Search

“See, before the Flood came, the people lived to be 900. But after the Flood, life spans dropped off to 400, and then 200, and then 100; but that's still a long time to live. And it's a simple fact the bones of your eyebrow ridge never stop growing. So if you could live to be three or four hundred years old, your eyebrow ridge would stick way out! People today that use their jaws a lot, like the Aborigines in Australia always using their jaws as a vice (they don't carry a toolbox with them), their eyebrow ridge sticks out really far, because of the chewing muscles. It pulls on the bone. The Neanderthals are perfectly normal humans that are living to be two or three hundred years old. That's all they are. Their brain's bigger than ours. They're not subhuman at all!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

Life, People, Way, Time

“GG Allin: I've seen people in my audience leave with broken bones, broken arms. I've seen them leave on strechers. I've seen rapes before me.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin on The Jerry Springer Show, May 5. 1993.
On The Jerry Springer Show

People

“Now rime, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,
And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill,
Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,
Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind.”

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628) English politician

"Elegy on Sir Philip Sidney" (1593).

Life, Art, Rage, Dead

“We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds, and the earth with their renown. And yet it almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; what parsimony is observed in doling out a scanty nook, a gloomy corner, a little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms could not satisfy, and how many shapes and forms and artifices are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, and save from forgetfulness for a few short years a name which once aspired to occupy ages of the world's thought and admiration.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"Westminster Abbey".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Men, Age, World, Smile

“What can I do with this memory?
Shake the bones out of it?
Defoliate the smile?
Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
Take the face of the man I love
and squeeze my foot into it,
when all the while my heart is making a museum?
I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Waking Alone" from The Divorce Papers
45 Mercy Street (1976)

Love, Fear, Smile, Way

“To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Six: 1497-1503

Parting, Sea

“The Muscogee was once a mighty people. The Georgians trembled at your war-whoop, and the maidens of my tribe, on the distant lakes, sung the prowess of your warriors and sighed for their embraces. Now your very blood is white; your tomahawks have no edge; your bows and arrows were buried with your fathers. Oh! Muscogees, brethren of my mother, brush from your eyelids the sleep of slavery; once more strike for vengeance; once more for your country. The spirits of the mighty dead complain. Their tears drop from the weeping skies. Let the white race perish! They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on your dead! Back! whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven! Back! back — ay, into the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings! Destroy their stock! Slay their wives and children! The red man owns the country, and the pale-face must never enjoy it! War now! War forever! War upon the living! War upon the dead! Dig their very corpses from the graves! Our country must give no rest to the white man's bones.”

Tecumseh (1768–1813) Native American leader of the Shawnee

Speech to the Creek people, quoted in Great Speeches by Native Americans by Robert Blaisdel. This quote appeared in J. F H. Claiborne, Life and Times of Gen. Sam Dale, the Mississippi Partisan (Harper, New York, 1860). However, historian John Sugden writes, "Claiborne's description of Tecumseh at Tuckabatchie in the alleged autobiography of the Fontiersman, Samuel Dale, however, is fraudulent. … Although they adopt the style of the first person, as in conventional autobiography, the passages dealing with Tecumseh were largely based upon published sources, including McKenney, Pickett and Drake's Life of Tecumseh. The story is cast in the exaggerated and sensational language of the dime novelist, with embellishments more likely supplied by Claiborne than Dale, and the speech put into Tecumseh's mouth is not only unhistorical (it has the British in Detroit!) but similar to ones the author concocted for other Indians in different circumstances." Sugden also finds it "unreliable" and "bogus." Sugden, John. "Early Pan-Indianism; Tecumseh’s Tour of the Indian Country, 1811-1812." American Indian Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1986): 273–304. doi:10.2307/1183838.
Misattributed, "Let the White Race Perish" (October 1811)

Women, War, Children, People

“She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend. 'I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend were were in Canada' 'That's how dumb we were,' I say. 'You could be sisters,' the nurse says. So how come, I'll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glorious place? But do they ask? They do not ask. Two months, and how long is the drive? The best I can explain it is this - I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the gritiest, but it's the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the bone - and when he looked at it - it scared him to death. I mean, he died. So I hadn't dared to look any closer. But now I'm doing it - and hoping that I will live through it.”

Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer

Reasons to Live (1985)

Death, Hope, Cars, Drink

“If I were a young man
With my bones full of marrow,
Oh, if I were a bold young man
Straight as an arrow,
I'd store up no virtue
For Heaven's distant plain,
I'd live at ease as I did please
And sin once again.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Brittle Bones".
Country Sentiment (1920)

Distant

“I have been told that at school I was the sort of simpleton who suffered from dux-disease. It is reckoned in Iceland that those who are afflicted by this disease can never become anything other than drunkards, journalists, or junior clerks... I was spiritually as well as physically in a state of suspended adolescence. Lessons came welling up out of me as if I were talking in my sleep. I could reel off the bones in a dog at the drop of a hat, any time at all, just as if I had them in my pockets; if I had been woken up at three o'clock in the morning, I would have detailed each and every one of them, just as if I had been lying on them.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Disease, School, Dogs, Lying

“And though our bones, they may break
And our souls separate,
why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil
From the grip of the soil,
why the long face?”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Sawdust & Diamonds
Ys (2006)

Soul

“The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness. So the best way seems to be to scourge oneself with thin cords which hurt superficially, rather than to use some other means which might produce serious internal injury.”

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) Catholic Saint, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)

No. 86.
Spiritual Exercises (1548)

Pain, Way, Suffering, Hurt

“Rattle his bones over the stones!
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns!”

Thomas Noel (poet) (1799–1861) English poet

The Pauper's Ride, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"We Three" Ch. 11 : Union
The Essential Rumi (1995)

Soul, Joy, Dance

“The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in American Museum of Natural History "Velociraptor had feathers" ScienceDaily (September 20, 2007)

Bird, Learning, Animals

“Actually, it was in Paris in 1914 that I did my first collages, for an occultist friend. They were mysterious portico's which were supposed to replace mural paintings and which evoked the structure of palm branches or fish-bones. [remark on the first collages Arp made, in different materials]”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Source: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 430

Fish, Painting

“In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Last words of the preface
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

War, Age, Suicide, Dead

“Sell the country, bury bones. What else?”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

the unself-conscious policeman
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Country

“"But, doctor, what will happen to my teeth and bones if I stop drinking milk?" Nothing. Nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway.”

Frank Oski (1932–1996) American pediatrician

Source: Don't Drink Your Milk! (1983), p. 50

Drink

“I looked at the high walls where once-white paint had grayed and then peeled. Barbara had always said the house had good bones, and she was right about that; but it had no heart, not with us living inside it. In place of laughter, trust, and joy, there was a hollow emptiness, a kind of rot, and I marveled at my blindness. Was it the alcohol, I wondered, that had made it bearable? Or was it something else, some inner failing? Maybe it was neither. They say that if you drop a frog into boiling water, he'll hop right out. But put the same frog into cold water and slowly turn up the heat, and he'll sit quietly until his blood begins to boil. He'll let himself be cooked alive. Maybe that's how it was for me. Maybe I was like that frog.”

John Hart (1965) American author with multiple books and awards

Source: The King of Lies (2006), Ch. 31.

Alcohol, Laughter, Water, Heart

“No British Government ever will and ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier.”

Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) British politician

Letter to Sir Eyre Crowe (16 February 1925) on the Polish Corridor, quoted in Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 356.
1920s

“Even our own cadaver-bones shall not hinder us from standing our ground until the very last, proud and tired in the face of the black wall that surrounds us.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Beckman's Diary, 10 October 1943, Amsterdam; as cited on: 'Arts in exile' http://kuenste-im-exil.de 1940s

“I have feminist bones and when I hear things or see people react to women in certain ways I have very little tolerance.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Celia Walden Glamour "I have a healthy appreciation of Ryan Gosling" http://www.gilliananderson.ws/transcripts/10_15/14glamour.shtml (August, 2014) 2010s

Women, People, Way

“It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)

Love, Color, Spring, Christ

“Just you think, in a rocket a man takes the risk of bursting like a balloon, or freezing, or roasting, or sweating all his blood out in a single gush, before he can even cry out, and all that remains is bits of bone floating inside armored hulls, in accordance with the laws of Newton as corrected by Einstein, those two milestones in our progress. Down the road we go, all in good faith and see where it gets us. Think about our success Kelvin; think about our cabins, the unbreakable plates, the immortal sinks, legions of faithful wardobes devoted cupboards…”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 12: "The Dreams", p. 185 [elipsis in original]

Faith, Law, Thinking, Success

“[Bill Clinton] has not a creative bone in his body. Therefore he is a bore and will always be a bore.”

David Brinkley (1920–2003) American journalist

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19961118&id=jHw0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=AckEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1354,2780351

“I mentioned the Magna Carta. That’s the foundations of modern law. We will soon be commemorating the 800th anniversary. We won’t be celebrating it – more likely interring what little is left of its bones after the flesh has been picked off by Bush and Obama and their colleagues in Europe.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2010s, 2013, Speech at DW Global Media Forum

Law

“Lo, when two dogs are fighting in the streets,
With a third dog one of the two dogs meets;
With angry teeth he bites him to the bone,
And this dog smarts for what that dog has done.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Act I, sc. vi
Tom Thumb the Great (1730)

Dogs, Fight

“I find the totality of metamorphosis most terrifying when I'm Woyzeck… Suffering through that had as devastating an impact on me as if I hadn't only always suffered as Woyzeck but continue to do so over and over. Malaria of the soul, recurring again and again. My total being is one large breeding ground for the shocks of the world past, present and future. All living and dying, all vibrations pass through me. The entire universe pours into me, rages in me, rampages through and over me. Annihilates me. It comes and goes whenever it likes. It rules me, commands me, envelops me, threatens me, and waits for me everywhere and all the time. It sucks me up, sucks me dry, grows through me. It's in my spinal marrow. In my brain mass. In my blood, in my bones. My muscles. Guts. Genitals. Sperm. Flesh. Eyes. Hearing. Taste. Smell. Balance. Laughter. Tears. In my days and nights. In my thoughts. In my feelings. In my courage and my fear. In my despair and my hope. In my weakness and my strength. Everywhere and all the time.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On his performance in Woyzeck. p. 315
Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996)

World, Fear, Hope, Feeling

“For every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States we only get 1 pound back in meat on our plates. The other 15 pounds are inaccessible to us, either used by the animal to produce energy or to make some part of its own body that we do not eat (like hair or bones) or excreted.”

Frances Moore Lappé book Diet for a Small Planet

Source: Diet for a Small Planet, p. 69

Animals, Parting

“Those of us who love the country and country things feel in our bones the urbanisation of our land and the need that something should be done to preserve our birds and our flowers.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the unveiling of the Hudson Memorial in Hyde Park (19 May 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 129.
1925

Love, Feeling, Flowers, Bird

“It's yet another mark of Auden's superiority that whereas his contemporaries could be didactic about what they had merely thought or read, Auden could be tentative about what he felt in his bones.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'On Auden's Death'
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

Reading

“I come fresh from the street,
fast on my feet, kind a lean and lazy;
not much meat on my bones, and a whole lot alone,
and more than a little bit crazy.
The old six string was all I had
to keep my belly still,
and for each full hour lesson I gave
I got a crisp ten dollar bill.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

I Wanna Learn a Love Song
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

“He puts his bones back on,
Turning the clock back an hour.
She knows flesh, that skin balloon,
the unbound limbs, the boards,
the roof, the removable roof.
She is his selection, part time.
You know the story too! Look,
when it is over he places her,
like a phone, back on the hook.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"You All Know the Story of the Other Woman"
Love Poems (1969)

Time, Parting

“Among other dreadful and disgusting images which Custom has rendered familiar, are those which arise from eating animal food. He who has ever turned with abhorrence from the skeleton of a beast which has been picked whole by birds or vermin, must confess that habit alone could have enabled him to endure the sight of the mangled bones and flesh of a dead carcase which every day cover his table. And he who reflects on the number of lives that have been sacrificed to sustain his own, should enquire by what the account has been balanced, and whether his life is become proportionately of more value by the exercise of virtue and by the superior happiness which he has communicated to [more] reasonable beings.”

John Hawkesworth (book editor)

From his edition of Swift's Works, as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 168.

Life, Happiness, Food, Exercises

“Sometimes a strange light
shines, purer than the moon,
casting no shadow, that is
the halo upon the bones
of the pioneers who died for truth.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Groping", p. 12
Frequencies (1978)

Truth, Light

“The notion that you need animal food as protein is one of the great conspiracies of bullshit by the government. Did we not all grow up saying we had to have four glasses of whole milk a day for healthy bones? It’s ridiculous. It’s liquid cholesterol.”

Steve Wynn

"Steve Wynn: Viva Las Vegan", interview with the Las Vegas Weekly (4 November 2010) https://lasvegasweekly.com/dining/2010/nov/04/steve-wynn-viva-las-vegan/.

Food, Animals