Bones

Famous quotes containing the word bones:

“There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.

There’s a woden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean—a river dried to its bed”
—Charles Simic (b. 1938)

“They were not on the table with their elbows.
They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks.
I saw no men there and no bones of men there.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)

“The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)