Forgotten Bones Quotes

When people asked about his schizophrenia, Eric, who didn't exactly flaunt his illness but wasn't ashamed of it, either, offered up the comparison of alcoholism. Not every drunk is a single bourbon away from skid row, just like every schizophrenic is not a tatty-haired, crazy-eyed gunman who delights in murdering alien-people from clock towers. There are functioning alcoholics just as there are functioning schizophrenics, individuals who work, maintain homes, and have hobbies, goals, and relationships like every other slob on the planet. ~ Vivian Barz

Like each morning he was putting his identity on inside out while dressing in the dark. ~ Vivian Barz

Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head - a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind - and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time. ~ George Du Maurier

With whom do you argue? With a woman, of course. Not with a friend, because he accepted all your defects the moment he found you. Besides, woman is mother-have we forgotten? ~ Marcello Mastroianni

For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world's great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the sun's being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets - and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity's resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance. ~ Doris Lessing

When things are serious and either Amy Eleni or I need to beat our personal hysteric, the informal code is to seize your head and twist coils of your hair around your fingers and groan, "I'm not mad! I'm not mad! I don't want to die!" And if you have a friend who knows, then the friend grabs her head too and replies, "There's someone inside of me, and she says I must die!" That way it is stupid, and funny, and serious.

Our hysteric is the revelation that we refuse to be consoled for all this noise, for all this noise and for the attacks on our softnesses, the loss of sensitivity to my scalp with every batch of box braids. Sometimes we cannot see or hear or breathe because of our fright that this is all our bodies will know. We're scared by the happy, hollow disciple that lines our brains and stomachs if we manage to stop after one biscuit. We need some kind of answer. We need to know what that biscuit-tin discipline is, where it comes from. We need to know whether it's a sign that our bones are turning against the rest of us, whether anyone will help us if our bones win out, or whether the people who should help us will say "You look wonderful!" instead. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

I gasp.

All around me, the dead are risin.

Another leg bone bobs to the muddy surface. Then a skull. A arm bone. They swing lazily. The current grabs 'em an carries 'em away.

Wreckers must of used the dry riverbed as a mass grave an now the heavy rain's churnin it all up.

I snatch my hands from the water, hold my arms high, outta the way. Slowly I turn in a circle, blinkin the rain away from my eyes.

Ohmigawd, I says. Ohmigawd ohmigawd ohmigawd.

The river's alive with dead men's bones. It's thick with 'em.

My breath's comin shallow an fast.

I feel somethin touch me. I make myself look down. A skellenton's wrapped itself around my chest. The skull grins up at me.

I shove it away. But when I pull my hands up agin, the whole top half of the skellenton comes with 'em. I'm stuck in the ribcage. The skull's right in my face.

I scream. Shake myself loose. Scramble to git away. Lose my footin.

I fall. I go unner.

An the current sweeps me away. ~ Moira Young

The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten - that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

The pug owner continued, "Not to be a Grinch, I only ask because I'd forgotten how much work dogs are. They have to be walked several times a day, and it's holy murder crawling out of bed early on a dark winter morning to take Poppy out. But she yips and yaps and scratches at the bed until I do. Then there's the matter of chewing. I can't tell you how many leather shoes Poppy's ruined. And she's not even a big dog, certainly not one of those eternally hungry dogs like yellow Labs who will eat anything, even the contents of wastebaskets, no matter how much you feed them. ~ Nancy Thayer

I've never tried to run away from my race. I was born a black man. You know that in your bones as soon as you are able to understand this country ... My approach to life about race is, I don't see the difference between black people and white people. ~ Edward Brooke

She had stayed on simply because she had forgotten that her feet could carry her away. ~ Olive Tilford Dargan

I slept and saw God's forge in frost. Its hearth was quelled, and as it cooled so swooned the verdancy it kept above. In slumber it grew a thick winter skin, white as bedsheets. In their folds the waker dreamt, her breath as steam, her touch as hot as iron, forgotten in the fire. ~ Andrew Hussie

The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; 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

A recipe is not an exact formula, but it does need a certain structure. When the bones are right, you can dress it in many ways. ~ Bee Wilson

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors. ~ Ivan Chtcheglov

Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman's truncheon. ~ Stephen Fry

He might come in useful.'
'Yeah. So's a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head. ~ Iain M. Banks

A weapon needs a wielder; it should not be permitted to start its own fights."
"You are not my wielder; you are naught, a forgotten ghost, not even a memory."
"Maybe, but you are still a weapon. ~ Angelo Tsanatelis

All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten. ~ Henry Miller

When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear. When the body's intelligence declines, cleverness and knowledge step forth. When there is no peace in the family, filial piety begins. When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born. ~ Laozi

Alexander the Great found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave. ~ Diogenes Of Sinope

But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing. ~ George Orwell

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times. ~ James Buchan

We may be able to tell how many stars are in the Milky Way; we may be able to count the petals of every flower, and number the bones of every bird; but unless faith leads us to a deeper understanding, a more reverent comprehension of the significance of the universe, God can be no more pleased with our knowledge than the painter is pleased with the fly which touches his picture with its feelers, and sips the varnish from the surface, and dies without dreaming of the meaning, thought, feeling, embodied in the colors. ~ Henry Van Dyke

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps. ~ Hart Crane

Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you ~ Stephenie Meyer

Today, so long, so strange, so bitter; will soon be some forgotten yesterday. ~ L.M. Montgomery

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day. ~ Alexander Payne

France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster. ~ Johnny Depp

But stories are fragile. Like people's lives. It only takes a word out of place to change them forever. If you hear a lovely tune, and then you change it, the new tune might be lovely too, but you've lost the first one." "But if I stick to the first tune, then I've lost the second." "But someone else might discover it. It's still there to be born." "And the first tune isn't?" "No," Tallis insisted, although she was confused now. "It has already come into your mind. It's lost forever." "Nothing is lost forever," Mr. Williams said quietly. "Everything I've known I still know, only sometimes I don't know that I know it." All things are known, but most things are forgotten. It takes a special magic to remember them. "My grandfather said something like that to me," Tallis whispered. "Well there you are. Wise Old Men, one and all… ~ Robert Holdstock

I can hear. Hear them. It. Don't you hear? It was a struggle to speak, to form coherent thoughts. The call here was different; not the beehive sound of Craigh na Dun, but a hum like the vibration of the air following the striking of a great bell. I could feel it ringing in the long bones of my arms, echoing through pectoral girdle and spine. Jamie ~ Diana Gabaldon

If you watch what the birds and wild animals do, you can survive pretty much anywhere, because they know things humans have forgotten, such as what's poisonous and what's not, and what it means when things suddenly get too quiet, and where to hide when what it means is danger. ~ Jenny Wingfield

Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift, the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.
This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet. ~ Yoon Ha Lee

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can't figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won't ever know what it had been all about. ~ Robert Penn Warren

In life I have done many things, proclaimed even more, most of which will be forgotten. What people will treasure dearly, is how I stirred their emotions and brought out the best in them - Konjic ~ Rehan Khan

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. ~ Robinson Jeffers

We left in the same kind of truck that had brought us to the camp ten years earlier. When it started up, I was taken back to our departure from Pyongyang, and to my mother's tear-lined face as it receded into the distance. The vision struck me with new and unexpected force - for I had all but forgotten my mother. ~ Kang Chol-Hwan

I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe's house. I'd planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote, by the wind grieved. The ~ Ron Rash

Deeply disturbing in a way that only the most honest stories are, YACCUB is a fiercely written, daring journey through America's urban wilderness and into the souls of our forgotten brothers. But Wrath James White hasn't forgotten about them
and after reading this book, neither will you. ~ Brandon Massey

While I'm playing baseball, I'm still writing songs and having tapes sent to me. I'm sure I'll spend a lot of time in the whirlpool resting these tired bones, so I'll be thinking of music then. ~ Garth Brooks

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves ~ Irvin D. Yalom

If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The intellect,-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't even know if I have bones in my body anymore. I don't know how I'm standing. I could melt under the sweet heat of his lips that are now tracing a line down my chest to the very top of my breasts, as he tugs gently at my shirt, giving himself room to leave one more brush of his lips, before he stops. ~ Lauren Blakely

Everybody gave 100%. I mean everyone, because they all knew that the film had the bones and the heartbeat of something that could be good. And everyone was in on it and wanted it for me and wanted it for Roger and Beau. ~ Pierce Brosnan

It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. James Fenton, "A German Requiem ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen