Down To The Marrow.

By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror.

–Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp Of The Perverse

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

–T.S. Eliot

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

― Dorothy Parker

 

To thrust all that life under your tongue!—

that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

Death’s a sad Bone; bruised, you’d say,

 

and yet she waits for me, year after year,

to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison.”

–Anne Sexton, Wanting To Die

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

― Franz Kafka

Number 48: The bones is yours Dad! They came from you my Daddy.

The President: Confess! Now you hep?

Number 48: Hip, Dad, hip.

The President: Confess!

Number 48: And a hip bone.

The President: Confess!

Number 48: And a thigh bone.

The President: Confess!

Number 48: Shin bone, knee bone.

The President: Confess!

Number 48: Back bone. All yours Dad.

—The Prisoner

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

–Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

T’ain’t no sin to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.

― Tom Waits

I’ve tasted blood and I want more.

–Janet Weiss, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.

― Neil Gaiman

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

-Shakespeare, The Tempest

to live in this world

you must be able

to do three things

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go

–Mary Oliver