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Quotes About Skulls

In earlier times, when there was a rage for physiognomy, a Gall might have dissected the brains of such chess champions to determine whether there was a special convolution in their gray matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump more strongly marked than in the skulls of others. And how excited such a physiognomist would
~ Stefan Zweig
Seven skulls vividly convey the long road of human evolution. From left they are: Adapis (50 million years ago), Proconsul (23–15 million years), Australopithecus africanus (3 million years), Homo habilis (2 million years), Homo erectus (1 million years), early Homo sapiens (92,000 years) and Cro-Magnon (20,000 years ago).
~ Bill Bryson
There were no windows in the stone room, but light came from a tasteful arrangement of seven human skulls hung from the ceiling on an iron chain with candles burning in them. There was also a low fire buzzing on an open hearth. In its sombre red glare, less bright yet more widespread and descriptive than the glow of the skull lamps, unknown objects winked on the walls-bone things, metal things-and symbols drawn there in yellow and white clay seemed to dart, disintegrate and reassamble.
~ Tanith Lee
Instruments of magecraft were everywhere apparent, polished skulls, star charts, a long eastern window from which personally to observe the heavens, a crystal of clairvoyance minted in brass.
~ Tanith Lee
I wasn't sure what Sun Tzu or Beowulf would say about flirting with cute guys. Maybe share the skulls of your enemies with them, as a gesture of affection?
~ Brandon Sanderson
Crystal skulls are a metaphor that reality is a consciousness hologram through which we experience virtually.
~ Stephen Richards
I collect skulls; I think that a beautiful skull is a really good gift for a guy.
~ Bella Heathcote
Jim Tile was questioning Augustine about the skulls on the wall. "Cuban voodoo?
~ Carl Hiaasen
As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is— How many skulls?— the same way that whalers hail— How many barrels? And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.
~ Herman Melville
Speaking of bones recalls an ugly custom of theirs, now obsolete—that of making fish-hooks and gimlets out of those of their enemies. This beats the Scandinavians turning people's skulls into cups and saucers. But
~ Herman Melville
Light was provided by baskets of burning bones. Skulls grinned from niches in the wall, presiding over offerings of braided, hairy plant-roots, which suggested the temple was still in use for all its appearance of neglect. On the far side of the chamber, bowls of lighted oil on the floor illuminated a ragged curtain, which was drawn across an alcove. Ays experienced a deep feeling of recognition. He knew that he was in the home of a god, and that he had been here before.
~ Storm Constantine
A sanctuary (ca. 6200 B.C.) contained four men's skulls deposited under the bulls' heads fastened to the walls. One wall is decorated with paintings depicting vultures with anthropomorphic legs attacking a decapitated man. This must certainly represent an important mythico-ritual complex, the meaning of which unfortunately escapes us.
~ Mircea Eliade
Skulls are what people dont know to be good luck, they ward off bad.
~ A. J. McLean
Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle
~ Charles C. Mann
Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
~ Tom Stoppard
The skulls were there and I could say something with them. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around -- hair, eyes and all, with the tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable-- and knows no kindness with all its beauty.
~ Georgia O'Keeffe
But who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?
~ Winston Churchill
I did want to be included. I just wasn't willing to pay the entry fee. On my better days I could even grant that we were the same creatures. Much was the same and little different. The same unlikely forms. Elbows. Skulls. The remnants of a soul.
~ Cormac McCarthy
How many seconds separate Jake or any of us from those burdens of fate? Three? Five? At some point in our lives, the cut may have been that fine. Who can say, and perhaps it is not worth pondering. But we do, don't we? We gnaw on that bone of possibility until our teeth are dull and our skulls throb. There are other life-lines than the one we landed on, and we can taste it.
~ Craig Davidson
Leonardo's initial anatomy studies of 1489 focused on human skulls. He started with a skull that had been sawed in half, top to bottom (fig. 60). Then the front of the left half was sawed off. His groundbreaking technique of drawing the two halves together made it easy to see how the inner cavities were positioned relative to the face. For example, the frontal sinus, which Leonardo is the first person to correctly depict, is shown to rest just behind the eyebrow.
~ Walter Isaacson
This same library is my den — the only corner of the Hall-house where I am safe from my … cousins. They never venture there, I suppose for fear the folios should fall down and crack their skulls; for they will never affect their heads in any other way... — Miss Diana Vernon
~ Walter Scott
It is something they will see everywhere - a disregard for danger, a companionship with death. By the end of a year they will know it well: the antic bravado, the fatal games, the coffin shop beside the cantina, the sugar skulls on the frosted cake.
~ Harriet Doerr
There's no denying that the way horror has been packaged in the past has done it no favours. Lurid black covers adorned with skulls, corpses crawling with insects and scantily clad maidens being chewed into by vampires -- all good clean fun, but it doesn't do much to give the genre an air of respectability or seriousness to the casual browser.
~ lebbon tim
African and European skulls of half a million years ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead
~ Jared Diamond