Skeletons Quotes

Maybe anger is like a river. Maybe it crumbles everything around it. Maybe it hides so many skeletons beneath the rolling surface. ~ Elizabeth Acevedo

The key to skeleton is to find the line, and I think I spend most of training figuring out where that sweet spot is ... ~ Katie Uhlaender

We all have skeletons in our closets. Some of us are just better at hiding them behind the hangers filled with clothes." "Yeah, right, you don't seem like the type of guy who has a pile of femur bones stuffed behind your collared shirts and navy blue blazers." Nick and Wilson ~ Gretchen De La O

I don't have any skeletons in my closet that can't be allowed out. ~ Walter Isaacson

people were like icebergs--most of what really went on, especially the ugliness, was submerged ~ Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

The bones of the skeleton which support the body can become the bars of the cage which imprison the spirit. ~ J. Ruth Gendler

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. ~ George Orwell

Well, the gold fish in the bowl lay upside down bloating
Full in the sky and the plains were bleached white with skeletons
Various species grouped together according
To their past beliefs
The only way they ever all got together was
Not in love but shameful grief ~ Don Van Vliet

These are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you; your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they're not necessarily evil, unless you let them be. ~ Sherman Alexie

Gone is the boy with the guns and the skeletons in his closet. These hands holding me have never held a weapon. These hands have never touched death. These hands are perfect and kind and tender. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Do yourself a favor,' I said. "Forget it. Forget you ever saw me."
"Forget that you tried to kill me too?"
"Yeah. That, too."
"But who are you?"
"Percy-" I started to say. Then the skeletons turned around. "Gotta go!"
"What kind of name is Percy Gotta-go?"
I bolted for the exit. ~ Rick Riordan

When you give me art - give me something that reaches inside of my core and twists, taking the very breath that sustains me away.
Give me something that wakens me from my lethargy.
Give me something that causes me to ponder and question all that I have come to know; due to my circumstances that I have been allotted in this life.
Give me something that causes me to question my pride and arrogance of knowing that I am right in my thoughts, beliefs and perceptions.
Shake me: as if you had grabbed me and pushed me against the wall - shattering all of my preconceived notions; causing me to break out of the box that I have put others in.
Give me something that scraped over the scar tissue of wounds that you carry within, opening them afresh and causing you pain - real core pain - pain that you had pushed down; pain that now resides in your closet of skeletons.
When you give me art, give me you, or give me nothing at all…
©2014 Suzanne Steele ~ Suzanne Steele

By the time she had picked every visible corpse off her property, the heap included ants, beetles and cockroaches, different kinds of spiders, some bees, flies, a wasp, two fetid lizard skins and the brittle remains of their skeletons, six butterflies, a stick insect the length of her forearm, two dragonflies, a handful of crickets and other creatures that in the world of naming remained untitled. The collection measured a full hand deep. She paid no attention to the odour rising out of the bucket. The scent of decay was not offensive to her. It was the aroma of life refusing to end. It was the aroma of transformation. Such odour was proof that nothing truly ended, and she revelled in it as much as she did the cereus blossoms along the back wall of the house. ~ Shani Mootoo

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones - dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything else earthly. ~ Thomas Hardy

I'm a closet sociopath. You can tell by all the skeletons I have hanging up next to my clothes. ~ Jarod Kintz

If you read any poetry or stories coming out these days, you know what I mean when I say that you can smell the stench of liquor coming from the words they write. And underneath their sentences lies a pile of chicken and goat bones, and the skeletons of the innocent ones. If you poke the head of the broom into contemporary literature, you'll find a hollow wall stuffed full of money - impure, dirty money. ~ Uday Prakash

Harrowhark's talent had always been in scale, in making a fully realised construct from as little as an arm bone or a pelvis, able to make an army of them from what anyone else would need for one, and in some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons. ~ Tamsyn Muir

Shame fills me at revealing this new family secret. One that can be added to the skeletons already spilling into our lives. ~ Sejal Badani

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see. ~ Mary Roach

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality. ~ James Salter

Well, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that I decided to take Holly travelling to some ancient Indian burial ground in the middle of the desert. I've considered it, from time to time… anyway, he would be using the Black Arts to invoke fallen spirits, spirits that would generally be unwilling, uncooperative… so, there would be an explicit contest of wills. Holly would have to heap conjuration upon conjuration, precisely because spirits and demons are often reluctant to be summoned, and if they were summoned, they would do everything in their power to escape Holly's control, threaten him and deceive him. To gain the upper hand in the game, Holly would have to wield a horrible amount of power… which he does indeed have, and it would be quite spectacular to watch, no doubt. Thousands of ghouls and skeletons rising up from the ground, rushing forth against the wind on deceased white horses towards the crashing waves of the sea, and considering that Holly has more in common with demons himself than he will ever care to admit, he probably wouldn't be able to stop once he started. We would have radical weather patterns and rising sea levels on our hands for days, perhaps even weeks… if he ever tried it, it would probably kill him, but hell's bells, it would be a really captivating show to see! ~ Rebecca McNutt

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton. ~ Willa Cather

Once again the absurdity of my inner thoughts overwhelms me, and I want to crawl out of my skin, escape my ugly, awkward flesh and be a skeleton, naked and anonymous. ~ Isaac Marion

Species differ - but are often not very different. Only humans have human minds. But believing that only humans have minds is like believing that because only humans have human skeletons, only humans have skeletons. ~ Carl Safina

I've lived here ... my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident. ~ Jennifer McMahon

Think about how much of your Bible, Old and New Testaments, is in the form not of doctrinal statements but of stories. Statements declare doctrinal truth; stories illustrate doctrinal truth. Doctrinal statements are like skeletons - bare bones, but absolutely essential to give form and order and interconnection to the body of revealed truth. Stories flesh out that skeleton, incarnate that truth, demonstrate how the doctrine looks and moves and acts in the real world of flesh and blood. ~ Layton Talbert

When all was said and done, daughter, what had he got to be psychological about?' She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions. Ma herself didn't get depressions, didn't either, tolerate depressions and, as with lots of people here who didn't get them and didn't tolerate them, she wanted to shake those who did until they caught themselves on. Of course at that time they weren't called depressions. They were 'moods'. People got 'moods'. They were 'moody'. ~ Anna Burns

That's where they found the skeletons. Right where you're standing. ~ Teresa Flavin

This young woman," said Diana, "was responsible for the destruction of the Triumvirate's fleet."
"Well, I had a lot of help," Lavinia said.
"I don't understand," I said, turning to Lavinia. "You made all those mortars malfunction?"
Lavinia looked offended. "Well, yeah. Somebody had to stop the fleet. I did pay attention during siege-weapon class and ship-boarding class. It wasn't that hard. All it took was a little fancy footwork."
Hazel finally managed to pick her jaw off the pavement. "Wasn't that hard?"
"We were motivated! The fauns and dryads did great." She paused, her expression momentarily clouding, as if she remembered something unpleasant. "Um…besides, the Nereids helped a lot. There was only a skeleton crew aboard each yacht. Not, like, actual skeletons, but - you know what I mean. Also, look!"
She pointed proudly at her feet, which were now adorned with the shoes of Terpsichore from Caligula's private collection.
"You mounted an amphibious assault on an enemy fleet," I said, "for a pair of shoes."
Lavinia huffed. "Not just for the shoes, obviously." She tap-danced a routine that would've made Savion Glover proud. "Also to save the camp, and the nature spirits, and Michael Kahale's commandos."
Hazel held up her hands to stop the overflow of information. "Wait. Not to be a killjoy - I mean, you did an amazing thing! - but you still deserted your post, Lavinia. I certainly didn't give you permission - "
"I was acting ~ Rick Riordan

There's got to be a backbone, there's got to be a skeleton to the whole way I perform, but you never want to hit the same note twice during a performance, I think. I think it's always got to be fresh so it doesn't bore me, and I always want to go out on edge. ~ Casey Abrams

The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur.
The snow fell on Bach's shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron.
This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future. ~ Vasily Grossman

In a lower voice, Hale asked, "I trust you know what to do?" "Indeed, sir." Marcus stood a little straighter. "I shall endear myself to the staff and find out where all the skeletons are buried. Both literally and figuratively." "We can probably do without the literal skeletons, but I like the enthusiasm," Hale said with a slap on Marcus's arm, ~ Ally Carter

But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes. ~ Isaac Marion

I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore. ~ Billy Corgan

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step. ~ Honore De Balzac

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton. ~ Storm Jameson

Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves. ~ Lemony Snicket

In the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

We've all got skeletons, but I'm afraid you might have a whole god damn cemetery. I'm going to go through with your plan, mostly because I don't know if we have a choice. What really bothers me though, is that my gut feeling tells me that as much as I sense the fight in you, I'm not so sure you'd run away from death. Making plans with someone like you is dangerous. ~ Donna Augustine

Good. So you may be dense, but you're not an idiot.'
'How can you even talk to me like that? Don't you know I can summon zombies and skeletons and –'
'Right now you couldn't summon a wishbone without melting into a puddle of darkness, di Angelo,' Will said. 'I told you, no more Underworldy stuff, doctor's orders. You owe me at least three days of rest in the infirmary. Starting now.'
Nico felt like a hundred skeletal butterflies were resurrecting in his stomach. 'Three days? I – I suppose that would be okay. ~ Rick Riordan

In Breeze's business one got used to running across the skeletons in people's closets. If Billy's skeleton wore women's underwear, it didn't really matter. Homosexuality on Billy Winston was like acne on a leper. ~ Christopher Moore

I now know how your anger
came from skeletons
that rattled in your heart
and you couldn't escape them. ~ Susie Clevenger

The thing I hate most about skeletons is you can never tell when they're smiling. ~ Stephen Blackmoore

You have skeletons, too, Carter Shaw. Don't think I don't know it. I think...I think people with secrets, or with a past, I guess I should say, I think we're kindred spirits. Like maybe we see something in each other that no one else takes the time to see. ~ Nyrae Dawn

The cat which isn't let out of the bag often becomes a skeleton in the cupboard. ~ Geoffrey Madan

We all behave like Maxwell's demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as "superintelligent," but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. ~ James Gleick

The best thing about me is there are no skeletons. ~ David Cross

Whoever had designed the skeletons of creatures had even less imagination than whoever had done the outsides. At least the outside-designer had tried a few novelties in the spots, wool and stripes department, but the bone-builder had generally just put a skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further along, stuck on some arms and legs and had the rest of the day off. Some ribcages were longer, some legs were shorter, some hands became wings, but they all seemed to be based on one design, one size stretched or shrunk to fit all. - Ponder Stibbons ~ Terry Pratchett

One dark night the skeletons that they had carefully hidden in an obscure closet appeared, grabbed them around the throat, and strangled them. ~ Ben Carson

It's rare that I've read a script where I'm like, "Oh, my god, it's hilarious!" All you want is a good skeleton and good characters. Then, you can go, "Okay, I can bring a lot to this. I can improvise and I can create something out of this." ~ Nick Swardson

Without the emotion and willingness of Spirit, our music becomes dry and dusty - without life. Without doctrinal bones as a skeleton, the Body is not enfleshed in a healthy way. ~ Marva Dawn

[An artist] will sooner and with more certainty, establish the character of skeletons, than the most learned anatomist, whose eye has not been accustomed to seize on every peculiarity. ~ Rembrandt Peale

A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets. ~ Sol Stein

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him. ~ E. M. Forster

I can't wait to die so I can be a skeleton and play my chest like a xylophone. ~ Thom Yorke

It was almost as if we'd passed our gaze from the healthy skin of a supermodel to the ragged infections of a burn-victim's corpse. Any industry buildings that had once stood proudly in the city were now hollowed-out skeletons with tents decorating their innards. The tall apartment buildings were burned and then rebuilt into towering layers of jagged, cut metal, brightly colored canvas roofs, solar panels, and graffiti. ~ Michael-Scott Earle

I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it's not its fault. That's obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.
If the old imbeciles hadn't discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn't have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors! ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating. We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones? ~ Henry David Thoreau

Writers wear their skeletons on their sleeves. While the rest of the world locks them in a closet. ~ Zachary Koukol

On the street, men appeared to me like mad ghosts, old skeletons out of joint, whose bones, badly strung together, were falling to the pavement with a strange noise. I saw the necks turning on top of broken spinal columns, hanging upon disjointed clavicles, arms sundered from the trunks, the trunks themselves losing their shape. And all these scraps of human bodies, stripped of their flesh by death, were rushing upon one another, forever spurred on by a homicidal fever, forever driven by pleasure, and they were fighting over foul carrion. ~ Octave Mirbeau

I feel like we all have our skeletons. ~ Taraji P. Henson

Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Coral reefs, the rain forest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species of the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid. ~ James Hansen

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons. ~ Jack Horner

Not many skeletons left in my closet because I invite them to dance all over the front room! ~ John Schneider

Boys never become men, they become skeletons and skulls. ~ Phoebe Hoban

With great care, Amy opened the cellar door.
With ladylike demeanor, she descended the stairs. And as her reward, she had the satisfaction of catching His Mighty Lordship sitting on the cot, his knee crooked sideways and his ankle pulled toward him, cursing at the manacle.
"I got it out of your own castle," she said.
Northcliff jumped like a lad caught at a mischief. "My . . . castle?" At once he realized what she meant. "Here on the island, you mean. The old ancestral pile."
"Yes." She strolled farther into the room. "I went down into the dungeons, crawled around in among the spider webs and the skeleton of your family's enemies - "
"Oh, come on." He straightened his leg. "There aren't any skeletons."
"No," she admitted.
"We had them removed years ago."
For one instant, she was shocked. So his family had been ruthless murderers! Then she realized he was smirking. The big, pompous jackass was making a jest of her labors. "If I could have found manacles that were in good shape I'd have locked both your legs to the wall."
"Why stop there? Why not my hands, too?" He moved his leg to make the chain clink loudly. "Think of your satisfaction at the image of my starving, naked body chained to the cold stone - "
"Starving?" She cast a knowledgeable eye at the empty breakfast tray, then allowed her lips to curve into a sarcastic smile.
"You'd love a look at my naked body, though, wouldn't you?" He fixed his gaze on her, and for on ~ Christina Dodd

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Did you know that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two little mongrels on the streets of Moscow. Pchelka, which means Little Bee, and Mushka, which means Little Fly. They went up in Sputnik 6. They were supposed to get into orbit and come right back. But the rockets misfired and shot them into space.

Whenever I look at the night sky, I think about those dogs. Wearing these hand-stitched spacesuits, bright orange, with their paws sticking out. Big fishbowl helmets. How… crazy. Floating out and out into space. How bewildered they must have been, dying from oxygen deprivation. For what? They would have happily spent their days rummaging through trashcans.

For all anyone knows these dogs are still out there. Two dead mongrels in a satellite. Two dog skeletons in silly spacesuits. Gleaming dog skulls inside fishbowl helmets. They'll spin through the universe until they burn up in the atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Or get sucked into a black hole to be crushed into a ball of black matter no bigger than an ant turd. ~ Craig Davidson

Each of us has his skeletons in his soul, as the English say. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I don't mind being introduced to people's skeletons firsthand, in person. I more than don't mind it. I prefer to reach right into the closet and shake their bony hands and say hello for myself. ~ Emery Lord

Dark seams radiated outwards like a shotgun blast of ink, as if Nico's body were trying to expel all the shadows he'd travelled through. Yesterday had been worse: an entire meadow withering, skeletons rising from the earth. Reyna wasn't anxious for that to happen again. ~ Rick Riordan

Hedge scrambled away, but the first two skeletons grabbed his arms and lifted him off the ground. The coach dropped his bat and kicked his hooves. "Lemme go, ya stupid boneheads!" he bellowed. ~ Rick Riordan

There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in
the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

I have known politicians with more skeletons in their closet than an undertaker's wife. ~ Dacre Stoker

Silence. Ah (...) Isn't that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They're quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They'll tell you. They've got famillies. This is how some families are all the time. And some people like to call these families repressed, or emotionally stunted or whatever, but do you know what I say? (...) I say, lucky fuckers. Lucky, lucky fuckers. (...) What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they've got behind it is a bathroom or a lounge. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody's old historical shit all over the place. They're not constantly making the same old mistakes. They're not always hearing the same old shit. They don't do public performances of angst on public transport. Really, these people exist. I'm telling you. The biggest traumas of their lives are things like recarpeting. Bill-paying. Gate-fixing. They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be. Go on, ask them. And they'll tell you. No mosque. Maybe a little church. Hardly any sin. Plenty of forgiveness. No attics. No shit in attics. No skeletons in cupboards. No great-grandfathers. I will put twenty quid down now that Samad is the only person in here ~ Zadie Smith

If you have had an unfortunate experience, forget it. If you have made a failure in speech, your song, your book, your article, if you have been placed in an embarrassing position, if you have fallen and hurt yourself by a false step, if you have been slandered and abused, do not dwell upon it. There is not a single redeeming feature in these memories, and the presence of their ghosts will rob you of many a happy hour. There is nothing in it. Drop them. Forget them. Wipe them out of your mind forever. If you have been indiscreet, imprudent, if you have been talked about, if your reputation has been injured so that you fear you can never outgrow it or redeem it, do not drag the hideous shadows, the rattling skeletons about with you, Rub them off from the shite of memory. Wipe them out. Forget them. Start with a clean slate and spend all your energies in keeping it clean for the future. ~ Orison Swett Marden

Pop culture is more and more about skulls and skeletons and zombies and vampires, and that's not just on Halloween. ~ Michael Almereyda

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large-headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially pea-brained dinosaurs. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense. ~ Mary Doria Russell

Any man who isn't married by thirty-five is either gay or he's got skeletons in his closet. ~ Lisa Renee Jones

The more work you put in on your outline and getting the skeleton of your story right, the easier the process is later. ~ Drew Goddard

We might be done with the past but the past isnt done with us. Ever think of that? Maybe the only way to move forward isnt to shove all our skeletons into a closet and pretend they never existed. The closet is still there, Nico, and the next time you open it, all that shit is going to fall in top of you. - Raven Black ~ Dannika Dark

I need geometry to set the grammar of the image expressive language . The structural skeleton, the composition and the geometric layout provide a perspective from which one can read the image; otherwise we would do what Dadaists did when they put words in a little bag and then took them out at random in order to compose a poem. ~ Augusto De Luca

Instead, I woke early the next morning, before sunrise, and went out into the world. I walked past my car. I stepped onto the pavement, still warm from the previous day's sun. I started walking. In bare feet, I traveled upriver toward the place where I was born and will someday die. At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon. ~ Sherman Alexie

The wind kicks in stronger, branches clatter. Or maybe skeletons. Bones of abandonment. Ghosts that will never be. ~ Ellen Hopkins

Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts Wet processions Families walk Stunted boys big heads don't talk Look bony skulls & silent round eyes Starving black angels in human disguise. ~ Allen Ginsberg

Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.

I hear the bones grind, I see
our two skeletons. ~ Anna Swirszczynska

In the far reaches of the county, cottages were found with skeletons enlaced in the beds, the bones of the baby in the kettle. ~ Lauren Groff

That was what had finally broken through her blindness. Her father had saved his people and destroyed himself. As strong as he looked, inside he was a ruin, or perhaps a funeral pyre, like the Cusp- only instead of melted bones of ijji, he was made up of the skeletons of babies and children, including, as he had always believed, his own child: her. This was his remorse. ~ Laini Taylor

All schools have their skeletons. St Oswald's is no exception. Most of the time, we try our best to keep them in the closet. But this time, the only recourse we have is to throw open all the closets, light as many bulbs as we can and catch the vermin as it comes out. ~ Joanne Harris

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us. ~ Alexandra Fuller

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light. ~ Kat Rosenfield

Everything has been written. Everybody knows everything about me. There are no secrets. Except the skeletons in my closet. ~ Kirby Puckett

I saw on his face a glimpse of his past. The damage, the unhappiness and the pain, and I wondered what kind of skeletons he has been hiding and for how long. It's one of those mutual attraction moments that are unexplainable, but as real as anything you've ever seen. Almost like my soul knows his soul. ~ Cyma Rizwaan Khan

It is the kind of place where human skeletons might sink into the soil undisturbed and unmourned. ~ Nadifa Mohamed

Hamburg totally wrecked us. I remember getting home to England and my dad thought I was half-dead. I looked like a skeleton, I hadn't noticed the change, I'd been having such a ball! ~ Paul McCartney

I watched 60 Minutes ... and they showed this woman, she's in every kind of..thing like that. 'This woman', they say, 'she lost her first four children
died from malnutrition
and, now, she's afraid that her new six-month-old newborn twins will suffer the same fate' ... Who's going to step in and say ... 'kick her in the cunt 'til it doesn't work', 'that woman is a sociopath! that is a sick human being!' ... How much of a sociopath do you need to be? That is the slow ritual torture-murder of children, one after another! At what point does cause-and-effect not kick in? How many bulb-headed skeletons have to go stiff in your arms?! ... 'what? this one's not working ... oh, well let's try again', one after another. At what point do you not go 'I think this is bad'? ... How many kids are you going to fuckin' kill, lady? ... If you impregnate someone under those conditions, they should abort the parents! that's sick! ~ Doug Stanhope

All events of the past withered to mere skeletons, veined and fleshed of fancy. ~ Ashim Shanker

Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day. ~ Stephen Jay Gould