The Bone Feud Quotes

It's my belief that all of the greatest tales ever told have been told in saloons. It was in such smoky, heathen-filled den of iniquity that I first heard the tale of the Bone Feud. As with all great tales, it was at its core one hundred percent true. In fact, much of it has long been a matter of historical record. But tales grow in the telling, and I therefore must apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, and beg your indulgence for any romanticized embellishments. I have decided to present the story here, just as it was told to me. I find it entirely too rich and too entertaining to alter, simply to curry favor with pedants and historians. ~ Wynne McLaughlin

My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book. There are twenty modes of change, filter and translation between us. What an extravagant coincidence it would be if the exact quality, the translucent sweetness of her cheek, the very living curve of bone between the eyebrow and hair should survive the passage! How can you share the quality of my terror in the blacked-out cell when I can only remember it and not re-create it for myself? No. Not with you. Or only with you, in part. For you were not there. ~ William Golding

We rode back from Richmond decorously side by side on the top of a bus. It was as though my left side (her side) burned and was so to speak dissolving into steam, or gases. Other people may often have experienced this secret journeying with the intention of sex at the end, but I was new to it, as I was new to what Fulla had done to my skin and bone-marrow, my fingers and toes, not to mention the most obvious part, or parts of me. I could have stroked her, or gripped her, or licked her, all that long way back, but putting it off, waiting, keeping still, looking uninterested, was so much more exciting ... ~ A.S. Byatt

There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another - a deeper reality that ordinary people could glimpse only fleetingly, if at all. A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams. ~ Justin Cronin

With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted, ~ Laura Hillenbrand

Indians were made for film. Indians were exotic and erotic. All those feathers, all that face paint, the breast plates, the bone chokers, the skimpy loincloths, not to mention the bows and arrows and spears, the war cries, the galloping horses, the stern stares, and the threatening grunts. We hunted buffalo, fought the cavalry, circled wagon trains, fought the cavalry, captured White women, fought the cavalry, scalped homesteaders, fought the cavalry. And don't forget the drums and the wild dances where we got all sweaty and lathered up, before we rode off to fight the cavalry. ~ Thomas King

If he gave me a knife, he thought I'd need it. And not for digging up roots and hacking tree bark, either. Know its purpose, indeed. "It fits my hand," I said, looking down and stroking the small groove that fit my thumb. "How did you know to make it so exactly?" He laughed at that. "I've had your hand round my cock often enough to know the measure of your grip, Sassenach, ~ An Echo In The Bone.

What makes people is not bone structure and eye color, but the force of their personalities. the years of experience painted on their faces. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

You're Eve Dallas. You're the love of my life. My heart and soul. You're a cop, mind and bone. You're a woman of strength and resilience. Stubborn, hardheaded, occasionally mean as a badger, and more generous than you'll admit. ~ J.D. Robb

They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans ... So when the bread didn't rise, and the fish wasn't quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears and told her about her brains before he stalked on back to the store. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Because caring was a thing with claws. It sank them in, and didn't let go. Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg, more than a few broken ribs, more than anything that bled or broke and healed again. Caring didn't break you clean. It was a bone that didn't set, a cut that wouldn't close.

It was better not to care--Lila tried not to care--but sometimes, people got in. ~ Victoria Schwab

The boys asked themselves, naturally, if they could kill someone. Geraint had been brought up on tales of knights-at-arms and Icelandic warriors, but he did not imagine blood. Charles had disappointed his father by taking no pleasure in foxhunting or shooting. He rather thought he could not. Philip was not really listening to the conversation. He was looking at the juxtaposition of textures in the grass, the flowers, and the silks, and the very rapid colour changes that were taking place as the sky darkened. Browning and vanishing of red, efflorescence and deepening of blues. Tom imagines the thud and suck of a bomb, the flying stone and mortar, and could not quite imagine the crushing or burning of flesh. He thought of his own skull and his own ribs. Bone under skin and tendons. No one was safe ~ A.S. Byatt

We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Death Vision

I think it's a multiplication of sight,
Like after a low hovering autumn rain
When the invisible web of funnel weaves
And sheetweb weavers all at once are seen
Where they always were, spread and looping
The grasses, every strand, waft and leaf-
Crest elucidated with water-light and frost,
completing the fullest aspect of field.

Or maybe the grace of death is split-second
Transformation of knowledge, an intricate,
Turning realization, as when a single
Sperm-embracing deep ovum transforms,
In an instant, from stasis to replicating,
Star-shifting shimmer, rolls, reaches,
Alters its plane of intentions, becomes
A hoofing, thumping host of purpose.


I can imagine not merely
The falling away of blank walls
And blinds in that moment, not merely
A shutter flung open for the first time
Above a valley of interlocking forests
And constellations but a sweeping,
Penetrating circumference of vision
Encompassing both knotweed bud
And its seed simultaneously, seeing
Blood bone and its ash as one,
The repeated light and fall and flight
Of hawk-owl and tundra vole
As a union of origin and finality.

A mathematics of flesh and space might
Take hold if we ask for it in that last
Moment, might appear as if it had always
Existed within the eyes, translucent,
Jewel-like in stained gla ~ Pattiann Rogers

Do you understand?" the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy - the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. "Do you even know who we are?" it asked. ~ Clive Barker

Should I tell you that when we're apart, your body comes back to me in dreams? That when I sleep, I see you, the dip of your waist, the freckle above your hip, and when I wake up in the morning, it feels like I've just been with you, the phantom touch of your hand on the back of my neck fresh and not imagined? That I can feel your skin against mine, and it makes every bone in my body ache? That, for a few moments, I can hold my breath and be back there with you, in a dream, in a thousand rooms, nowhere at all? ~ Casey McQuiston

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. ~ W. H. Auden

It's worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it's within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

My son, you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. By the ceremony performed this day, every drop of white blood was washed from your veins; you were taken into the Shawnee Nation ... ~ Chief Blackfish

I could feel the certainty of a reality leeching out of me like calcium from a bone. I was starving my mind into obliqueness. I felt less and less. Words came and I spoke them in my head, then nestled in on the sound of them, got lost in the music. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

Wakeful

Islanded

Snow and silence in the streets.
Winter in the bone.
In silent houses people sleep.
each one alone.
Self-islanded by thought and dream
the solitary soul
forgets the deepest depth, the earth
that joins us all. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [ indicating her body ], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death. ~ George Bernard Shaw

With no gravitational force to work against, your body not only doesn't need the same amount of muscle and bone, it starts breaking them down. As on Earth, so in space: use it or lose it. And exercise may not solve the problem. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The citizenry's primary occupations are rubbish picking and luring strangers into the Acre to cosh them on the head and rob them. For amusement, they ingest whatever flammable liquids are at hand and sing badly at the top of their lungs. The area's main exports are smelted iron slag, bone meal, and misery. ~ Ransom Riggs

The grass was tall and parched, the limbs of the trees barren or else dotted with a few remaining leaves, the stragglers, bleached to the color of bone. They lifted in the breeze like waving hands, rustling like old paper. ~ Justin Cronin

The mind, the heart, the womb. Those three are all threaded in a sacred dance. A woman's pelvis is like an hourglass with the capacity to tell time. It both creates and shelters life. When a mother's diet in insufficient, nutrients are pulled from her own teeth and bone. Women are built to be selfless. ~ Alyson Richman

Crete was heavily fortified, but Nicephorus brushed aside the waiting Arab army by sending in his marines - terrifying Norse warriors whose terrible double-bladed axes could smash through armor and bone alike. ~ Lars Brownworth

It's not "Why have hamburger when you can have steak?" It's "I'll have the filet mignon, rib eye, t-bone, and fuck it, throw a couple of burgers in there too, I guess." Alphas need variety. ~ A.D. Aliwat

I don't know what it's like to be a friend any more than you do. I think "hard" when it should be "soft," or "gentle" when "forceful" is the key. Often it's giving every last drop of blood, then skinning myself and giving the skin too, when all you really want is my skeleton, wagging a bony finger, signing how much I love you.
I've drained and skinned and boned. I've signed back obscenities and watched your bone dust drift away. No, I don't know the meaning of "friend." Teach me? ~ Chila Woychik

He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom ... that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I can still only see a dragonfly, its wings as thin and light as silk and its body the color of rainbow. But on the wings of this dragonfly I take off and fly, for my soul carries no weight. It is our bodies – these borrowed vehicles of flesh and bone – that weigh us down. Our spirits are eternally free and invincible. ~ Daniela I. Norris

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