Quotes About Skin And Bones

“As he hums the melody softly into my ear, I can feel the notes seep deep into my skin and bones, and birth an ache in my soul I never knew existed. What is this, if not impossible?”

— Ashley Poston

“You are a woman. Skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat. You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies, not excuses.”

— Sarah Kay

“You can do this (this thing, where your body will cease to produce hormones and your skin, hair, muscles and bones ... basically every part of you will notice, go into withdrawals, and stage a coup). Be prepared for this mentally, and you'll own this thing.”

— Lisa Jey Davis

“I have nothing but admiration for myself as a youngster; I was a force to be reckoned with then, a much finer specimen than I am now. As kids, we had little meat on our bones; we were sticklike figures with big rounded bellies, the skin stretched so taut it was nearly transparent - you could just about see our intestines twist and coil on the other side. Our necks were so long and thin it was a miracle they could support our heavy heads.”

— Mo Yan

“Would you say you have a "philosophy" Of your own? If so what is it?'
'If I have it's all skin and bones ... If I have any philosophy ... it's that life could be better than it is.”

— Bernard Malamud

“Or perhaps is is that time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones - the angle of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile - has collapsed under the weight of your griefs.”

— Thrity Umrigar

“There was no skin on my voice and she heard the bones in my words.”

— Cath Crowley

“I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.”

— Herta Müller

“[She] was made up of skin and bones and hate and crazy, and hate and crazy don't weigh anything.”

— Barry Lyga

“Because I know it in my bones. You are the only female I desire, the only water that will quench my thirst, the only sun that will warm my skin, the only lips that were made for mine.”

— Dannika Dark

“We read to learn and to grow, to laugh, to be motivated, and to understand things we've never been exposed to. We read for strength to help us when we feel broken, discouraged or afraid. We read to find hope. We read because we're not just made up of skin and bones, and a deep need for chocolate, but we're also made up of words, words which describe our thoughts and what's hidden in our hearts.”

— Joan Bauer

“Cold. Foggy cold. Soaking through fabric, biting into the skin, clutching the bones until flesh crawled.
There was no moonlight, only orange, smoky lanterns, and the light made the snow glitter and turned the shadows into blood.”

— Erik Tavares

“Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf
a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments.”

— Ian McEwan

“In the zazen posture, your mind and body have, great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable.
In our scriptures (Samyuktagama Sutra, volume 33), it is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn how to run!”

— Shunryu Suzuki

“It was not necessary to leave to learn that. But there were other reasons to go. If a person had a child but no husband, a room but no house, a place but no home, a will but no way, and if a person was losing her son and herself, little by little, day by day, because she knew what she knew in her skin and bones but not what her sister-in-law knew in her books and pamphlets, then yes, it was necessary.”

— Jamie Zeppa

“It's like my mind knows to stay as far away from him as possible ... but my bones, my skin quiver in his presence.”

— David Estes

“It is with eight lengthy legs we use to catch food, balance and knit a beautiful silk bed,
but as babies we had lost our bones and skin, and hence our legs we had shed.”

— Jasmine Jean

“We're not children, neither of us. We don't believe in fairy tales. And if we did, who would we be? Not Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty. I slice murder victims' heads off and Anna stretches skin until it rips, she snaps bones like green branches into smaller and smaller pieces. We'd be the fricking dragon and the wicked fairy. I know that. But I still have to tell her.”

— Kendare Blake

“Feminists do the best Photoshop because they leave the meat on your bones. They don't change your size or your skin color. They leave in your disgusting knuckles, but they may take out some armpit stubble. Not because they're denying its existence, but because they understand that it's okay to make a photo look as if you were caught on your best day in the best light.”

— Tina Fey

“He could feel it immediately when his shoulder snapped - the intense pain of his bones cracking. His skin tightened, as if it could no long hold whatever was lurking inside him. The breath was sucked from his lungs like he was being crushed. His vision began to blur, and he had the sensation he was falling, even though he could feel the rock tearing at his flesh as his body seized on the ground.”

— Kami Garcia

“Ariel looked at her then, instead of the sky, instead of the horizon that surely beckoned to him. "Out of a thousand different winds, I think I can resist nine hundred and ninety-nine of them.
Now she was the one unable to swallow. "And the last one?"
"That one wrenches the beating heart from my chest, the blood from my veins, the marrow from my bones." Grasping her hand, he brought it up to his face and rubbed it against his cheek. Pain radiated from his pale skin, from his eyes, from his lips when they grazed her knuckles. "You've two birds to do your bidding, my fair huntress, but I want you to choose me, to love me above all others, to make the pain in my soul worthwhile ... or I would be free of you.”

— Lisa Mantchev

“If you ever get tired of skin and bones," she called to Mal, "I've got something to tempt you." I stiffened. Mal glanced over his shoulder. Slowly, he looked her up and down. "No," he said flatly. "You don't.”

— Leigh Bardugo

“Maybe some love is guaranteed? Maybe if it fits snugly and perfectly inside you and around you? Like your skin and bones ...”

— José N. Harris

“Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones
In fact, he's remarkably fat.
He doesn't haunt pubs - he has eight or nine clubs,
For he's the St. James's Street Cat!
He's the Cat we all greet as he walks down the street
In his coat of fastidious black:
No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers
Or such an impeccable back.
In the whole of St. James's the smartest of names is
The name of this Brummell of Cats;
And we're all of us proud to be nodded or bowed to
By Bustopher Jones in white spats!”

— T.S. Eliot

“I have terrible nightmares, you know. Every night when I come home from a long day's dying, I take off my skin and lay it nicely on my armoire. I take off my bones and hang them up on the hatstand. I set my scythe to washing on the old stove. I eat a nice supper of mouse-and-myrrh soup. Some nights I drink off a nice red wine. White does not agree with me. I lay myself down on a bed of lilies and still, I cannot sleep.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“Having one's image, and effectively, life, democratized, dehumanizes and sometimes objectifies it into an entertainment product. What sort of valuation of the ego would one have once you've let it been preyed upon by the public for years and years? Perhaps, it becomes truly just skin and bones.”

— Jack Gleeson

“Dorcas's skin was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more desirable in her imperfections than Jolenta had ever been in the lushness of her flesh.”

— Gene Wolfe

“Have they forgotten that I'm in here? They'll have to bring more food, or at least more water, or else I will starve, I will shrivel, my skin will dry out, all yellow like old linen; I will turn into a skeleton, I will be found months, years, centuries from now on, and they will say Who is this, she must have slipped our mind, Well sweep all those bones and rubbish into the corner, but save the buttons, no sense in having them go to waste, there's no help for it now.”

— Margaret Atwood

“People blanch to see "fish meal" or "meat meal" on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal
which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones
most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Muscle meat is a grand source of protein, but comparatively little else.”

— Mary Roach

“Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones.”

— Alice Hoffman

“No Hindu community, however low, will touch cow's flesh. On the other hand, there is no community which is really an Untouchable community which has not something to do with the dead cow. Some eat her flesh, some remove the skin, some manufacture articles out of her skin and bones.”

— B.R. Ambedkar

“Reinforced concrete buildings are by nature skeletal buildings. No noodles nor armoured turrets. A construction of girders that carry the weight, and walls that carry no weight. That is to say, buildings consisting of skin and bones.”

— Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

“My nickname was Skinabo - 'skin and bones.'”

— Ellen Barkin

“When you dance, your whole body dances, your skin and bones, your soul, The tips of your fingers and the roots of your hair. When you stop dancing you stop living.”

— Chloe Thurlow

“How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud ... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.”

— Louise Erdrich

“Mark nearly fell forward, and threw his arms around Julian. Julian barely managed to catch himself before almost falling over. Mark was whipcord thin, but strong, his hands fisting in Julian's shirt. Julian could feel Mark's heart hammering, feel the sharp bones under his skin. He smelled like earth and mildew and grass and nighttime air. "Julian," Mark said, muffled, his body shaking. "Julian, my brother, my brother." Julian sighed. He wanted to relax into his older brother, let Mark hold him up the way he once had. But Mark was slighter than he was, fragile under his hands. He would be holding Mark up from now on. It was not what he had imagined, dreamed of, but it was the reality. It was his brother. He tightened his hands on Mark and adjusted his heart to bear the new burden.”

— Cassandra Clare

“Take off my clothes and there becomes a man. Take off my skin and there becomes my bones. Break all my bones and there becomes my heart. Smash my heart and there becomes my soul. And that you cannot take. And what is my soul? ... It is everything that make a man. It is everything that makes this man.”

— Carew Papritz

“She must have really loved him to leave her home for the Seam. I try to remember that when all I can see is the woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones. I try to forgive her for my father's sake. But to be honest, I'm not the forgiving type.”

— Suzanne Collins

“You are feeling sad? Befriend it. Have compassion for it. Sadness also has a being. Allow it, embrace it, sit with it, hold hands with it. Be friendly. Be in love with it. Sadness is beautiful! Nothing is wrong with it. Who told you that something is wrong in being sad? In fact, only sadness gives you depth. Laughter is shallow; happiness is skin-deep. Sadness goes to the very bones, to the marrow. Nothing goes as deep as sadness.”

— Osho

“What a shame it would be, if upon death, one who lived his life following his religion, were to find out that there is no Heaven and no Hell and that all souls just go out and back to the places where they came from, finally free from the monsters that hung onto their backs while they were in this world! And what a shame it would be, if upon death, one who lived life with no thought of her own soul, were to find out that some souls go to some place wonderful and some souls go to some place horrible! But what a shame it would be, for anyone, to live a life here on this Earth full of fear, void of freedom and happiness, meaningless and empty, due to either the probability of Heaven and Hell or the absence thereof! So what is really true, is that you and I have bones in our bodies and have flesh under our skin and we ought to live this life right here in such a way that creates Heaven on Earth and puts Hell far away.”

— C. JoyBell C.

“It had been along time since I breached the surface of the world above. My parents wouldn't allow it. So as far as I knew, the survivors that remained were savages. I'd seen a few things before our colony was built and most of the inhabitants left ran wildly through the bare, desert terrain, filth covering them from head to toe, bones protruding their leathery skin, and foam dripping from their mouths in search of one thing ...
Nourishment.”

— Lauren Hammond

“What the hell is that?" yelled Lord Maccon. He had turned to anger so swiftly; Alexia could only stare at him, speechless.
She let out her pent-up breath in a whoosh. Her heart was beating a marathon somewhere in the region of her throat, her skin felt hot and stretched taut over her bones, and she was damp in places she was tolerably certain unmarried gentlewomen were not supposed to be damp in.
Lord Maccon was glaring at her coffee-colored skin, discolored between the neck and shoulder region by an ugly purple mark, the size and shape of a man's teeth.
"that is a bite mark, my lord," she said.
Lord Maccon was ever more enraged. "Who bit you?" he roared.
Alexia tilted her head to one side in amazement. "You did." She was then treated to the spectacle of an Alpha werewolf looking downright hangdog.
"I did?"
She raised both eyebrows at him.
"I did.”

— Gail Carriger

“Her heart was beating a marathon somewhere in the region of her throat, her skin felt hot and stretched taut over her bones, and she was damp in places she was tolerably certain unmarried gentlewomen were not supposed to be damp in.”

— Gail Carriger

“When we form heart-centered beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics we're creating the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves of energy, which aren't confined to our hearts or limited by the physical barrier of our skin and bones. So clearly we're speaking to the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that has no words: the belief-waves of our hearts.”

— Gregg Braden

“My young men shall never work, men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams. You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mothers breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother's hair.”

— Smohalla

“The Stone Age gave us arrow heads and eventually knives, and that allowed us to kill animals in ways you couldn't before, and once you had them you were able to remove the skin and bones.”

— Neal Barnard

“Although our package of skin and bones looks very convincing, it is a mask, an illusion, disguising our true self, which has no limitations.”

— Deepak Chopra

“In a way, humans are not made of skin and bones as such, as we're made of stories.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

“The intellect,-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings
To his strong bones, strides o'er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.”

— William Blake