1.
Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.
Chinua Achebe
2.
I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death.
Roger Waters
3.
They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes.
Imelda Marcos
4.
Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.
Primo Levi
5.
I myself identify as a recovering Blockhead. You'd be surprised how many twenty- and thirty-something hipster chicks have the NKOTB skeleton in their closet, albeit artfully concealed by stacks of Ksubi skinny jeans and ironic Judas Priest T-shirts.
Diablo Cody
6.
Everyone's got skeletons in their closet, and I've got a million in mine, believe me. I tested the envelope; I pushed it. Whenever somebody in authority told me not to do something, I did it just to find out why they said not to do it.
Denis Leary
7.
I'm in Stockholm in my office. I just got here after seeing my eighth child on an ultrasound, so I'm in a good mood. It's beautiful: an energetic little skeleton.
Stellan Skarsgard
9.
I said: "A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces". In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: "I am a tiger". When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.
Wole Soyinka
10.
I can't wait to die so I can be a skeleton and play my chest like a xylophone.
Thom Yorke
11.
The sound of a harpsichord - two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.
Thomas Beecham
12.
Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin.
Paul Klee
13.
There's a lot of skeletons in my closet, but I know what they're wearing. I'm not gonna act all ashamed of it.
Naomi Watts
14.
Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death...to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it's like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You'll get wonderful things out of that.
Alan Watts
15.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
David Foster Wallace
16.
Skeletons of mice are often to be found in coconuts, for it is easier to get in, slim and greedy, than to get out, appeased but fat.
Viktor Korchnoi
17.
If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.
Rita Dove
18.
It's not too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet with people, but to get the gold out is a different matter. That is therapy. Psychology is the Art of finding the gold of the spirit.
Robert Johnson
19.
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
Dan Simmons
20.
A weathered skeleton
in windy fields of memory,
piercing like a knife.
Matsuo Basho
21.
... there is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live.
Frida Kahlo
22.
I didn't believe in Bigfoot.I just thought, "No, that would be impossible. You know, we would have found Bigfoot by now. We would've found some skeletons, we would've found some sort of proof of Bigfoot." So, I didn't believe for a long time, but obviously this is the year we find Bigfoot. And obviously all scientists agree that there's definitely Bigfoot.There's no reason to debate it. It's like debating climate change. There's no reason to debate climate change anymore. There's no reason to debate whether there's Bigfoot. Clearly, the yeti exists.
Rob Huebel
23.
I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
Ingmar Bergman
24.
One thing you’ll say for skeletons, they’ll always give you a smile.
Steve Aylett
25.
There's a lot of skeletons in my closet!
John Hawkes
26.
...I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage. If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!
Arthur Rimbaud
27.
Everybody's got skeletons in the closets. Every once in a while, you've got to open up the closet and the let the skeletons breathe. Half the time, the very thing you think is gonna destroy you or ruin you is the very thing that nobody cares about. My advice to people with skeletons is to dust them off every now and then-- as long as your closet's aint full of them. It's not good to have more than two or three.
Tyler Perry
28.
The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.
Piet Oudolf
29.
There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.
Wilson Mizner
30.
Blackened skeleton arms of wood by the wayside pointed upward to the convent, as if the ghosts of former travellers, overwhelmed by the snow, haunted the scene of their distress. Icicle-hung caves and cellars built for refuges from sudden storms, were like so many whispers of the perils of the place; never-resting wreaths and mazes of mist wandered about, hunted by a moaning wind; and snow, the besetting danger of the mountain, against which all its defences were taken, drifted sharply down.
Charles Dickens
31.
The wind kicks in stronger, branches clatter. Or maybe skeletons. Bones of abandonment. Ghosts that will never be.
Ellen Hopkins
32.
Eloquent testimony to the recovery powers of wild animals frequently becomes apparent from the study of skeletons housed in museums.
Louis Leakey
33.
Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.
Terry Pratchett
34.
Can you imagine any better example of divine creative accomplishment that the consummate flying machine that is a bird? The skeleton, very flexible and strong, is also largely pneumatic - especially in the bigger birds. The beak, skull, feet, and all the other bones of a 25-pound pelican have been found to weigh but 23 ounces.
Guy Murchie
35.
The day of judgment will be a day when the skeletons come out of the closets! And each of us will be standing there to face the record.
Adrian Rogers
37.
Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something -- some new skeleton -- was emerging from beneath the softness of her accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.
Laini Taylor
38.
A living skeleton isn't enough for you, is it? What does it take to impress young people these days?
Derek Landy
39.
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather
40.
Valkyrie, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your friend is most likely dead.” “Of course he’s dead. He’s a skeleton.
Derek Landy
41.
There's got to be a backbone, there's got to be a skeleton to the whole way I perform, but you never want to hit the same note twice during a performance, I think. I think it's always got to be fresh so it doesn't bore me, and I always want to go out on edge.
Casey Abrams
42.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf
43.
The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo.
Mark Twain
44.
After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.
Gloria Swanson
45.
What happen to the pirates we are supposed to see? Then we go down the chutes, and it's where the pirates were. But they're all gone. There is nothing but skeletons down here!
John Hench
46.
I wondered how they would top the Pirates and skeletons and moonlight, because that's a pretty cool concept.
Orlando Bloom
47.
The first draft is just a skeleton-just bare bones. It's like the very first rehearsal of a play, where the director moves the actors around mechanically to get a feel of the action.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
48.
It's funny how certain objects convey a message - my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing _something - _my numbers is off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary, and says only one thing: "You are going to die."
David Sedaris
49.
I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.
Mary Roach
50.
Don't mess with me, lady. I've been drinking with skeletons.
Mike Mignola