The Bone Collector Quotes

I was working out at a gym in Montreal when I was doing 'The Bone Collector.' I walked in and said 'Where do I sign in?' Somebody behind me, without even seeing my face, said 'Excuse me, are you on 'Star Trek'?' They recognized me from my voice. ~ Leland Orser

as old as we may be in flesh, we are always young in the bone ~ Jeffery Deaver

What's left of what your body was - once the girl with bare shoulder blades , giggling, once the girl galloping an imaginary horse, once the girl sleeping in her sequined red dress - was now ash in a jar. Grains of bone. But then, I knew it wasn't you anymore. You were somewhere more. ~ Ava Dellaira

We should be told: Write fast, write close to the bone, write for ten hours straight until you're not thinking in words anymore, but in colors, in smells, in waves of memory. Right what you care about. Don't write one more word you don't care about. Don't waste any more of your life on what does not matter to you. Write only what matters to you - those scenes, those dialogues. Get messy. Before you get neat, get very, very messy. Write until you are more alive than you have ever been before. ~ Bonnie Friedman

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

He knew he needed to release her, but once he allowed his physical connection to drop away, he was uncertain if he'd ever have a chance to reconnect. Instinctively, he knew Azami was elusive, like water flowing through fingers, or the wind shifting in the trees. He needed a way to seal her to him.
"How does one court a woman in Japan? Do I need your brothers' permission?"
She blinked again. Shocked. A hint of uncertainty crept into her eyes. She frowned, and he bent his head to swallow her protest before she could utter it. Her mouth trembled beneath his, and then she opened to him, like a flower, luring him deeper. Her arms slid around his neck, her body pressing tightly against his. He tightened his fingers in her hair.
He was burning, through and through, from the inside out, a hot melting of bone and tissue. He hadn't known he was lonely or even looking for something. He'd been complete. He loved his life. He was a man with teammates he trusted implicitly. He lived in wild places of beauty he enjoyed. He hadn't considered there would be a woman who could ever fit with him, who would ever turn his insides soft and his body hard.
Feel the same way, Azami. He didn't lift his mouth, kissing her again and again because one he'd made the mistake, he was addicted and what was the use fighting it? Not when it felt so damn right.
Somewhere along the line, his kiss went from sheer aggression and command, to absolute tenderness. The emotion for her rose like ~ Christine Feehan

Mastery is more than the co-ordination of muscle and bone. It is about bringing the whole of us to what we do ~ Debashis Chatterjee

If I could fall in love with a girl, it'd be her. Those ifs are dangerous. You try them on in your head like dresses, so easy to slide in and out of. If I kissed girls, I'd kiss her. If we kissed, it'd go like this. At some point I dropped the if like a slip and just wore the feeling, nothing between it and my skin. When I kiss her. When it happens. All of it took place in my head, in silence, locked tight in skull bone and the frantic synaptic whispers between neurons, no clues popping out except the passive-aggressive haircut, the incriminating poem.
That's the problem with writers. Too much imagination.
The greater part of me knew it couldn't be real, but the hopeful part, which is more concentrated and condensed, rich in nine essential delusions, thought: It's not all in your head. ~ Leah Raeder

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Every night, no matter what has happened during the day, no matter if I am torn and bloodied or so bone-tired I wish I were dead, I look up at the stars and I give each star a brother's name or a sister's face. I will not sleep until I remember every one. The stars will burn out before I forget. ~ Cassandra Clare

How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he's finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else's? ~ Jenny Erpenbeck

The saw made a wet, ripping sound as it tore through flesh and bone. The wounded man jerked upward, his torso coming off the table. "Damn it! Hold him!" "I'm trying," responded Rebecca. ~ James D. Shipman

His entire aspect was menacing, starting with his chilling eyes and the pronounced bone structure of his face. He was tall and lean, but the skin on his arms was stretched over muscles that looked as taut as whipcord. The backs of his hands were bumpy with strong veins. His clothes and hair had snagged natural debris - twigs, sprigs of moss, small leaves. He seemed indifferent to all that, just as he did to the mud caked on his boots and the legs of his jeans. He smelled of the swamp, of sweat, of danger. ~ Sandra Brown

Suddenly the whole body writhed spasmodically and rolled over. His face ... He has no face ... The man's nose had completely burned away leaving only two holes in his head. The mouth had melted together, the lips sealed with the exception of a small opening in one corner. One eye had melted down over what had been his cheek, but the other ... the other was wide open. Where the rest of the face should have been there were only pieces of cartilage and bone sticking out between irregular shreds of flesh and slivers of fabric. The naked, glistening muscles contracted and relaxed, contorting as if the head had been replaced by a mass of freshly killed and butchered eels ... The skin over the collarbone on one side was gone and a piece of the bone stuck out, glowing white like a piece of chalk in a meat stew. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

'The Bone Season' is violent. There's sex. My little brother keeps asking to read it, and he's 9, so I'm like, 'No, it's not happening.' ~ Samantha Shannon

Exercise stimulates growth plates, by putting pressure on bone cells, forcing them to specialize and create new cells. Too much pressure, however, damages the growth plates, which are soft and fragile ... The rule of thumb is that lifting one's own body weight (in push-ups,pull-ups, etc) is fine at any age, and kids over fifteen can lift weights. ~ Arianne Cohen

You have heard, of course, of those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil that attack the unwary swimmer by thousands and with swift little nibbles clean him up in a few minutes, leaving only an immaculate skeleton? Well, that's what their organization is. "Do you want a good clean life? Like everybody else?" You say yes, of course. How can one say no? "O.K. You'll be cleaned up. Here's a job, a family, and organized leisure activities." And the little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone. But I am unjust. I shouldn't say their organization. It is ours, after all: it's a question of which will clean up the other. ~ Albert Camus

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they've been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. ~ David Wong

Back when I was restoring art and antiques, finding ivory was very difficult because it's illegal, and the only difference between bone and ivory is that bone is free and not illegal. ~ Dan Phillips

Mia had seen some fighters who moved like dancers, lithe and graceful. Others moved like bulls, and brawn and bluster. But Cassius moved like a knife. Simple. Straight. Deadly. There was no flash to his style. No flair. He simply cut right to the bone. ~ Jay Kristoff

Beautiful," his voice low and husky, his nose knocks mine, running up and down the side. "I not only want it, I want you to want it, too. To crave my kiss, to ache for the taste of me coating your lips. I don't want you throwing me a bone because it's the thing to do on dates." When his nose travels along mine this time I hold my breath, my fingers grapple on the front of his shirt as I listen to his seductive words coming out of that perfect, kissable mouth. The same mouth I list forward towards. "I would die for another kiss, Bexley, but I want you obsessed and consumed for it, too. To know I'm the only thing you can think about. ~ V. Theia

He bent his face into the curve of my neck. "We don't deserve anything Rowen. We don't deserve punishment, we don't deserve happiness, life owes us nothing. Realize that." His voice wasn't gentle anymore; it was as strong as I'd ever heard it. "So we have to take what we want because life sure as shit isn't going to freely hand it over." He kissed the skin just above my collar bone. "And I want you. ~ Nicole Williams

I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn't have seen this space as sad-making and vacant - I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found. ~ Susan Orlean

Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes in the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for a real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog. ~ Denise Levertov

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles. ~ Louis Bayard

And in so doing, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves. Now that was a thought made me shudder to the bone. I wondered if it were true, and if it were, what would happen when some deity bent out of true by mortal ambition returned to set the record straight. ~ Jacqueline Carey

Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever been cut to the bone, stabbed in the back? Have you ever given someone your whole heart only to find out they used your heart to beat you with it? Have you ever laid down your life for someone? Have you ever served with reckless abandonment and in return got back a list of things that you failed to do? ~ Kris Vallotton

Violet
232 books | 49 friends
see comment history Black for hunting through the night

For death and mourning the color's white

Gold for a bride in her wedding gown

And red to call enchantment down.

White silk when our bodies burn,

Blue banners when the lost return.

Flame for the birth of a Nephilim,

And to wash away our sins.

Gray for knowledge best untold,

Bone for those who don't grow old.

Saffron lights the victory march,

Green will mend our broken hearts.

Silver for the demon towers,

And bronze to summon wicked powers. ~ Cassandra Clare

But now, at the table, behind the fall of the tablecloth, behind the sheath of skin, hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as Pharaoh in its tomb. ~ Enid Bagnold

His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond
in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews have never stopped making. ~ Philip Roth

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

Dying feels like a familiar memory. Like a mental
imagery that is bone-deep, and somehow
melancholic. I am going to die. It is inevitable. It
is imminent. That is just the way the dice has
landed. ~ Nesrine BENAHMED

I didn't know it yet, but he would become one of our high school's super-athletes. There were hints of athletic (and, presumably, sexual) prowess there. For one, boys as ridiculously Abercrombie- esque good-looking as he was are always sports stars throughout high school. It is a rule, a self- fulfilling prophecy. It seems as if, sometime during elementary school, coaches make note of the little boys with the most classic bone structure and the best height projections and kidnap them, training them under cover of night. Not all of them will make it in college ball (that's what people call it, right?) because by the time they're all seniors, many of them will have been riding more on the sportsman-like nature of their faces than their actual abilities. But until that day, coaches will keep putting them on the field in the most prominent and visually appealing positions because they just kind of look like that's where they should be. At least I'm pretty sure that is what's going on. ~ Katie Heaney

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone. ~ Don DeLillo

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. 'What did they do to you?'
Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. 'They'-he looks about the Chapel-'cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There's a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug ... a veined, scrawny, dribbling ... bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left. ~ David Mitchell

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey aro ~ George Whitman