Skeleton Quotes

“The Skeleton

Chattering finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I;
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No: I may not tell the best;
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King's jest,
It was hid so carefully.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a 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.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“You look angry," he said.
"You put me on hold."
"For a very good reason."
"You put me," she said very, very slowly, "on hold.”
― Derek Landy, Kingdom of the Wicked

“I pointed at the little kids goading each other to jump from rib cage to shoulder and Gus answered just loud enough for me to hear over the din, 'Last time, I imagined myself as the kid. This time, the skeleton.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I sometimes think about old tombs and weeds
That interwreathe among the bones of kings
With cold and poisonous berry and black flower:
Or ruminate upon the skulls of steeds
Frailer than shells and on those luminous wings -
The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power,
Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grind
Into so wraith-like a translucency
Of tissue-thin and aqueous bone

- A Reverie of Bone”
― Mervyn Peake, Shapes and sounds

“He kisses me again, folding me in his arms--the place I want to stay for a thousand years. When I first discovered Dream Town, I wasn't sure where I belonged, where my true home was. But now I know. Sometimes home is a town, a house with four walls. Other times, it's two hollow eyes in a skull, a skeleton without a heartbeat. It's here---not in Dream Town or Halloween Town---but in Jack's arms.
Folded against this hollow, skeleton chest is where I belong.
I let the tears stream down my face, I let them bind us together, salt and water and fabric and bone. Woven parts of ourselves that become one.”
― Shea Ernshaw, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen

“The skeleton of success is self-discipline.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“If I am to be a skeleton in a box buried deep into the ground, I pray you will be the dust that rests atop my bones.”
― John Hennessy

“The skeleton was as happy as a madman whose straitjacket had been taken off.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Skeleton’s Holiday

“The magnificence of my skeleton is hidden by the weight of my flesh.”
― Vera Caspary, Laura

“At the crisp, inky hour of midnight, Jack and I are married atop Spiral Hill in the Death Door's Cemetery. Wind stirs the bone-dry leaves, and Jack takes my soft rag doll hands in his--the coolness of his fingers calming the flutter rippling across my stitched seams.”
― Shea Ernshaw, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen

“Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“She'd seen drawings of Death in dusty books. It was depicted as a skeleton, its vertebra exposed, black spots on its body symbolizing corruption. That Death and Hun-Kamé seemed entirely different from each other, but now she realized they could be the same.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow

“Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre.

„Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable.

In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra!

Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.”
― Cioran

“There can be conceptual skeletons on several different levels of abstraction. For instance, the "isomorphism" between Bongard problems 70 and 71, already pointed out, involves higher-level conceptual skeleton than that needed to solve either problem in isolation.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“The skeleton picked up the second skull, so worn as to barely be recognisable as such. The vertebrae fell and rolled like beads from a string.”
― J.A. Clement, On Dark Shores: The Lady

“Love caught me with my pants down, watering skeleton flowers and humming the blues.”
― R. X. Bird

“The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle.”
― Vera Caspary

“When the land is thirsty, and the people that live on it die of hunger, starvation creates a Gashadokuro.”
― Florin-Marian Hera, The Emperor's Trail

“Imagine someone in a skeleton costume. The costume is innocuous inasmuch as it is mere fantasy of dead bones over a living body of flesh. But, of course, there is a skeleton beneath that living body of flesh. Just as the skeleton is a costume over the flesh, the flesh is a costume over the skeleton. Flesh dies and reveals the skeleton, as if the skeleton is the death to come that is already inside the living flesh.”
― Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction

“It’s hard to tell sometimes if Etheny’s stories are true, as you will see, so I will lay down the story as she told it to me to allow you to decide for yourself.”
― E L Parfitt, Skeleton Cat

“Ultimately, the mirror reflects our mortality; when we gaze in the mirror, we gaze at a skeleton.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“Humans feel bereft of meaning; you need this mythology to shape the skeleton of your lives. Without myths, how can anyone live in this world and feel fulfilled?”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys

“At the ends of the extended spinal cord, a few long, thin bones stretched out on either side. Almost like… a fish tail.”
― Emily Layne, These Wicked Waters

“Together they walked across the property, the girl, the boy, and the dancing skeleton wrapped in rainbows. Neither of those who still possessed tissue and tongue spoke. This was the closest thing Loriel would have to a funeral; it would have been inappropriate to make light of it.”
― Seanan McGuire

“I simply imagine that my skeleton is me and my body is my house and that way I'm always at home.”
― Donald 'Jared' Dunn

“I hadn't known what to expect as I entered the ring of white trees- tall and straight as pillars- but it was not the tall, thin veiled figure in dark tattered robes. Its hunched back facing me. I could count the hard knobs of its spine poking through the thin fabric. Spindly, scabby gray arms clawed at the snare with yellowed, cracked fingernails.
...
Then slowly, it turned to me, the dark veil draped over its bald head, blowing in a phantom breeze.

A face that looked like it had been crafted from dried, weatherworn bone, its skin either forgotten or discarded, a lipless mouth and too-long teeth held by blackened gums, slitted holes for nostrils, and eyes... eyes that were nothing more than swirling pits of milky white- the white of death, the white of sickness, the white of clean-picked corpses.

Peeking above the ragged neck of its dark robes was a body of veins and bones, as dried and solid and horrific as the texture of its face. It let go of the snare, and its too-long fingers clicked against each other as it studied me.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“you were my favourite person / did i ever tell you that?”
― Elissar Mustapha, Inherent Skeletons of a Melancholy Mind

“The climate defines the skin color and skeleton structure.”
― Steven Magee

“The first Nintendo tape cartridge I tried was Ghosts N Goblins. As soon as the game began, I was immediately ambushed by zombies. I'd jump around aimlessly, tossing javelins, but was I'm a skeleton. Dead. It was over so quick, I couldn't even mentally process what just happened.”
― James Rolfe, A Movie Making Nerd