Corsets And Crossbones Quotes

Pretty words," Brooke said, dropping her arms so they laid limply at her sides. "But even the prettiest song can lose its intended meaning if it is repeated constantly. ~ Heather C. Myers

I can't always be making 'British films.' Why should we be making films about corsets and horses and girls learning to drive when Americans send over an event movie and make five or 10 million? ~ Noel Clarke

I'd love to slit my mother-in-law's corsets and watch her spread to death. ~ Phyllis Diller

Everything is important, but there is a weight to these big or expected things and then there is the logistics of them and it's trying to find, while you worry about for instance the ballroom scene, how do you get 500 people to go to the loo in corsets and don't cost you an hour and how do you remember while you're organizing all that to take a breath and say, 'Well the scene is about all of that and it's about [Prince] hand on the small of [Cinderella] back as well' and we need time to do that properly as well. ~ Kenneth Branagh

How it irks me to have to take her hand, allow her to pull my dress over my head, undo my corsets and strip them off my, and have her see my blue veined swollen flesh and the hairy triangle that still proclaims with lunatic insistence a non-existent womanhood. ~ Margaret Laurence

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees. ~ Joan Lindsay

What's really interesting is when you get a brand-new wave that has no connection to anything else. It always reflects society. The flappers would cut the dresses and make them looser, they smoked, their hair was short. It was a rebellion against the corset and the Edwardian era. ~ Annie Lennox

Even some rock star girls, which I didn't really know her name. I will probably find out and probably get slaughtered for not knowing her name, but she brought some of her clothes that she used to wear on stage. I wore one of the corsets and stuff. I don't know why I'm blanking. It was not Pat Benatar. It's like Debbie Gibson, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, I know those girls. ~ Julianne Hough

Love was nothing but a lie people told themselves.
But lust?
Lust was real, and he was feeling it. Feeling it to his core. As he held her to him, his blood pounded with the fiercest, most primal kind of need. One that spoke of possession and claiming and mine.
She made him wild.
Surely it was simply because he'd gone so long without female company. Madeline wasn't even his usual sort. Given his choice, he would have said he favored a bonny Scots lass with fiery hair and a knowing gleam in her eye. Not a shy, proper English gentlewoman just learning the taste of her first kiss.
But beneath the shyness and reserve, she possessed a natural, earthy sensuality. He couldn't help but think of what that might mean in bed- when all the rules and corsets were shed, and the dark freed her from propriety. ~ Tessa Dare

She wants me to take what magic I have left and blot every memory of this evening from their minds. To make them forget so that they can carry on as before. There will always be Cecilys, Marthas, and Elizabeths of the world - those who cannot bear the burden of truth. They will drink their tea. Weigh their words. Wear hats against the sun. Squeeze their minds into corsets, lest some errant thought should escape and ruin the smooth illusion they hold of themselves and the world as they like it.
It is a luxury, this forgetting. No one will come to take away the things I wish I had not seen, the things I wish I did not know. I shall have to live with them.
I wrench away from her grip. "Why should I?"
I do it anyways. Once I am certain the girls are asleep, I creep into their rooms, one by one, and lay my hands across their furrowed brows, which wear the trouble of all they've witnessed. I watch while those brows ease into smooth, blank canvases beneath my fingers. It is a form of healing, and I am surprised by how much it heals me to do it. When the girls awake, they will remember as strange dream of magic and blood and curious creatures and perhaps a teacher they knew whose name will not spring to their lips. They might strain to remember it for a moment, but then they will tell themselves it was only a dream best forgotten.
I have done what Mrs. Nightwing said I should do. But I do not take all their memories from them. I leave them with one small token of ~ Libba Bray

Gavin, I never thought you'd be the irrational one in this relationship, but I'm happy to report that you've just thoroughly shocked me."
He rolled to his side to lean on his arm, keeping my hand resting on his chest, buried underneath his shirt. "I know. My timing is impeccable." He smirked, letting his hungry gaze drift over my body. "But I'm sorry, love. I cannot take seeing you all tucked up in this sexy corset anymore. The ties are so tight, they're just begging me to undo them." His fingers trailed over the top of my chest and down over the corset's binding, tugging at the edges of the lace as he went. "Forcefully," he winked. ~ Rachael Wade

American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtightening
and chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale's bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold. ~ Eric Jay Dolin

Lefty had seen Desdemona undress many times, but usually as no more than a shadow and never in moonlight. She had never curled onto her back like this, lifting her feet to take off her shoes. He watched and, as she pulled down her skirt and lifted her tunic, was struck by how different his sister looked, in moonlight, in a lifeboat. She glowed. She gave off white light. He blinked behind his hands. The moonlight kept rising; it covered his neck, it reached his eyes until he understood: Desdemona was wearing a corset. That was the other thing she'd brought along: the white cloth enfolding her silkworm eggs was nothing other than Desdemona's wedding corset. She thought she'd never wear it, but here it was. Brassiere cups pointed up at the canvas roof. Whalebone slats squeezed her waist. The corset's skirt dropped garters attached to nothing because my grandmother owned no stockings. In the lifeboat, the corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona's face, head, and arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a conqueror's museum. All that was missing was the wings. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

My colleague deciphered some bits of the writing on the wolf-totem jar. He found a smattering of words and phrases that spoke of death and destruction. Nothing more."
"So basically a waning label," Painter said.
Kowalski frowned, "Why didn't they just slap it with a skull and crossbones to begin with? It would've saved everyone a bunch of trouble. ~ James Rollins

Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages. ~ Paul Gauguin

14 July 1942 - Jerusalem - ...A magnificent parcel, covered in tape and seals, arrived for me from India. Inside were two pairs of old fashioned corsets with bones and laces. They were sent by HRH The Duke of Gloucester. Nick and I had an argument as to how one should thank one of the Royal Family for a present of corsets. Whichever way we put it looked disrespectful. Finally we sent a telegram saying: 'Reinforcements received. Positions now held. Most grateful thanks. ~ Hermione Ranfurly

Women's scars and rituals involved beauty (piercing ears and noses, binding feet, and wearing corsets); men's involved protecting women. In cultures in which physical strength is still the best way to protect women, as among the Dodos in Uganda, each time a man kills a man, he is awarded a ritual scar; the more scars, the more he is considered eligible. ~ Warren Farrell

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph ~ Allen Ginsberg

When women take off their corsets and heighten their skirts it always means high inflation and low morals. ~ James Laver

Perhaps I won't marry then. Instead, you and I shall live as spinsters in a cottage by the sea. We'll burn our corsets, eat chocolate morning, noon and night and grow fat as hedgehogs. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

Tap the Skull and Crossbones app. ~ Karen Marie Moning

[Dessie's] shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman's world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves- smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that moulded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie's they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter. ~ John Steinbeck

Dearest Reece,
I know you think it improper, or at the very least imprudent, for us to write to one another, but I don't care.There are too many rules as it is and they would choke me if I let them. Between corsets and lessons and curtsies and etiquette, I am hardly myself, and that is how they want it. They would prefer we all dress and talk and think (or not think) alike, like paper dolls.
I do not wish to be a paper doll.
Surely you can see that I am stronger than that.I don't give a fig for the scandalbroth or the gossipmongers. Let us remove to Paris, where no one knows us to care and where they dine on scandal with eclairs every morning.
You will say again that it is impossible but I refuse to believe it. I know with every touch of your hand on mine, with every stolen kiss, that nothing is impossible.
Perhaps love isn't meant to be simple. Perhaps this is merely a test, such as Psyche went through to prove herself to Cupid. Would you have me count lentils, beloved?
And as you claim I have the most to lose, I pray you will let me decide for myself what it is I want and need.
Which is you.
Not silks or lobster soup in crystal bowls or diamonds around my neck.
Just you.
You say again and again that you love me.
Prove it. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century - wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars. ~ Laura Moriarty

Oh, hey. This looks promising.
We came to a stop before a high, barbwire fence with an enormous
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ALLOWED sign on it.
The lettering was red, apparently to emphasize how serious they were. Personally, I would have added a skull and crossbones to really drive the message home. ~ Richelle Mead

The Marquis looked very grave and replied, 'I knew, of course, the minute whalebone corsets went out of fashion that things were coming to a pretty pass. ~ Sally Gardner

On the black cotton was printed a white skull and crossbones - the skull head grinning as if he were mocking her. The nun struggled for her breath and wanted to drop the evil little banner, but her fingers wouldn't let go of it - making her stare into its horrid death face as if she were looking at her own end. ~ Victoria Dougherty

I'd love to be in a 1910s film - the era between the corsets and losing the corsets. ~ Vanessa Paradis

Oh, and I [Amy] may also have told him that I quite fancied Dr Smith [The Doctor]. Which in the 1780s was probably punishable by stoning or corsets. ~ James Goss

They helped each other with their corsets. Aunt Docia pulled as hard as she could on Aunt Ruby's corset strings, and then Aunt Docia hung on to the foot of the bed while Aunt Ruby pulled on hers.
"Pull, Ruby, pull!" Aunt Docia said, breathless. "Pull harder." So Aunt Ruby braced her feet and pulled harder. Aunt Docia kept measuring her waist with her hands, and at last she gasped, "I guess that's the best you can do."
She said, "Caroline says Charles could span her waist with his hands, when they were married."
Caroline was Laura's Ma, and when she heard this Laura felt proud. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman's experience could differ so greatly from another's that you never knew who you were talking to. ~ Meg Wolitzer

I can snap open corsets faster than bones." He held his knife up, his attention fixed on my chest. "Interested in a demonstration, fancy lady? Say the word and I'll show you what else I can do with such a fine figure."
Liza stiffened beside me. People often called women of supposedly questionable morals "fancy ladies." If he thought I'd blush and run off, he was sorely mistaken.
"Unfortunately, sir, I find I'm not terribly impressed." I casually slipped a scalpel from my wristlet clutch, enjoying the familiar feel of it. "You see, I also eviscerate bodies. But I don't bother with animals. I butcher humans. Would you care for a demonstration? ~ Kerri Maniscalco

I have loved corsets since I was small. When I was a child, my grandmother took me to an exhibition, and they had a corset on display. I loved the flesh color, the salmon satin, the lace. ~ Jean Paul Gaultier

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers. ~ Emile M. Cioran

I am a pig! I love to eat! i will eat anything! If you put it front of me, I will put it in my mouth, even if it doesn't taste good! And I can't stop eating until all the food is gone. It's probably one of the contributing factors as to why I became a drag queen. I can eat whatever I want, because I can just strap myself into a corset! ~ Manila Luzon

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband and wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species? As ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? ... a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species? ~ Christopher Ryan