skull quotes

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O I shall hear skull skull,
Hear your lame music,
Believe music rejects undertaking,
Limps back. O I shall hear skull skull,
Hear your lame music,
Believe music rejects undertaking,
Limps back.

Owen Dodson

music | musicians

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. . . Look! this flesh how it crumbles to dust and is blown!
These bones, how they grind in the granite of frost and are noth... - MORE . . . Look! this flesh how it crumbles to dust and is blown!
These bones, how they grind in the granite of frost and are nothing!
This skull, how it yawns for a flicker of time in the darkness,
Yet laughs not and sees not!

Conrad Aiken

aging | death

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Hell is out of fashion—institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the... - MORE Hell is out of fashion—institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull.... A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

J.G. Ballard

Hell

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The madhouse of the skull The madhouse of the skull

Samuel Beckett

thinking | thoughtful | madness

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I don't have to pound on that thick skull of yours and make big speeches as to what this mission means to us. I think you know. If... - MORE I don't have to pound on that thick skull of yours and make big speeches as to what this mission means to us. I think you know. If you do good, it means the lives of several thousand men, so do good.

Alvah Bessie

success | war | duty

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Erudition. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull. Erudition. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Ambrose Bierce

scholars and scholarship

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Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but... - MORE Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether or not proportionally to his larger body, has not, I believe, been fully ascertained. In woman the face is rounder; the jaws and the base of skull smaller; the outlines of the body rounder, in parts more prominent; and her pelvis is broader than in man; but this latter character may perhaps be considered rather as a primary than a secondary sexual character. She comes to maturity at an earlier age than man.

Charles Darwin

men | women

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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game... - MORE Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.

Annie Dillard

joy | mystery | suffering

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Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,... - MORE Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,
pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case
(what the skull can endure!)

Hilda Doolittle

destruction | disasters | Pompeii

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In my skull,
from which vision took flight,
will come wine
will pour song
of the cool night. In my skull,
from which vision took flight,
will come wine
will pour song
of the cool night.

Hilda Doolittle

vision

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