Figurine Quotes

I held out a lead figurine of Hades—the little Mythomagic statue Nico had abandoned when he fled camp last winter. Nico hesitated. "I don’t play that game anymore. It’s for kids." "It’s got four thousand attack power," I coaxed. "Five thousand," Nico corrected. "But only if your opponent attacks first." I smiled. "Maybe it’s okay to still be a kid once in a while.

And, whoa!" He turned to Mr.D. "Your the wine dude? No way!" Mr.D turned hi eyes away from me and gave Nico a look of loathing. "The wine dude?" "Dionysus, right? Oh, wow! I've got your figurine!" "My figurine." "In my game, Mythomagic. And holofoil card, too! And even though you've only got like five hundred attack points and everybody thinks your the lamest god card, I totally think your powers are sweet!" "Ah." Mr.D seemed truly perplexed, which probably saved my life. "Well, that's...gratifying.

I'm sorry," he says. "What? Why?" "You're fixing everything I set down." He nods at my hands, which are readjusting the elephant. "It wasn't polite of me to come in and start touching your things." "Oh, it's okay," I say quickly, letting go of the figurine. "You can touch anything of mine you want." He freezes. A funny look runs across his face before I realize what I've said. I didn't mean it like that. Not that that would be so bad.

Who are you?" he asked. "I'm a shabti, of course!" The figurine rubbed his dented head. He still looked quite lumpish, only now he was a living lump. "Master calls me Doughboy, though I find the name insulting. You may call me Supreme-Force-Who-Crushes-His-Enemies!

Like I need to play on the Wii when you're there willing to f*** me. Video games are what men invented to fill the sex void. Any man who chooses video games over sex deserves to live in his mother's basement with his mint-condition, in box Star Wars figurines and his real doll.

Then there were the shabti, magical figurines that were supposed to come to life when summoned. A few months ago, I’d fallen for a girl named Zia Rashid, who’d turned out to be a shabti. Falling in love for the first time had been hard enough. But when the girl you like turns out to be ceramic and cracks to pieces before your eyes—well, it gives “breaking your heart” a new meaning.

It’s in English,” I call out as it comes into focus. “It says ‘Made in China.’” At first Sister Loretta thinks I must be wrong, but when she sees the words for herself, she explains to us that God anticipated that the Communists in China would create technology that makes medals, rosaries, and plastic figurines really cheaply, and He was ready to temporarily forgive them for not being a democracy and for being pagans if they were willing to sell these holy goods to us at a fantastic discount, which shows us that God, like everyone else, goes out of His way to get a good deal on something He really needs. Who doesn’t like a bargain?

Where are you taking us?" Nico said. "You should be honored, my boy. You will have the opportunity to join a great army! Just like that silly game you play with cards and dolls." "They're not dolls! They're figurines! And you can take your great army and—

I start to picture a world where Jesus had been killed using a different murder device. I picture little ceramic guillotine figurines. I imagine miniature nooses hung above children's beds. Electric chair necklaces and earrings.

I'm actually a hardcore otaku who likes maids more than having three meals a day. And I only read books related to maids. Also, I only visit maid cafes. Of course, I also collect maid figurines. I play games which feature female maids and it turns me on so much. Then I'll wear the maid uniforms and jump in joy. I'll take my leave now.

She was made for ultimate respect. How is she supposed to get that disguised as a teddy bear in a bridal gown?" "It's not a bridal gown, it's a skirt for her scabbard. And it's cute." "She hates cute. She wants to maim and scar cute." "Nobody hates cute." "Angel swords do." He arches his brow and stares down at me. I guess I won't tell him how many cutesy angel figurines and pictures we used to have in the World Before.

He was tough as an antique ivory figurine, which has withstood the viscissitudes of centuries and can accept more.

Oh, it's okay," I say quickly, letting go of the figurine. "You can touch anything of mine you want." He freezes. A funny look runs across his face before I realize what I've said, I didn't mean it like that. Not that that would be so bad.

How silly were the idolaters of old, who knelt before the clumsy wooden figurines of their own making! We are wiser now. We kneel before mirrors.

He rushed past the usual fragments of painful memories – his mother smiling down at him, her face illuminated by the sunlight rippling off the Venetian Grand Canal; his sister Bianca laughing as she pulled him across the Mall in Washington, D.C., her green floppy hat shading her eyes and the splash of freckles across her nose. He saw Percy Jackson on a snowy cliff outside Westover Hall, shielding Nico and Bianca from the manticore as Nico clutched a Mythomagic figurine and whispered, I’m scared. He saw Minos, his old ghostly mentor, leading him through the Labyrinth. Minos’s smile was cold and cruel. Don’t worry, son of Hades. You will have your revenge.

I opened my backpack and checked my supplies: some enchanted rope, my curved ivory wand, a lump of wax for making a magical shabti figurine, my calligraphy set, and a healing potion my friend Jaz had brewed for me a while back. (She knew that I got hurt a lot.)

...Cromwell informed me I’d only have the keys to my car once I’d earned his trust back. His trust? Like I was the creeptastic person who whipped kids off the street and collected them like figurines?

GGRRROOCCCCK... Ian's knees buckled. The rock outcropping shook the ground, sending a spew of grayish dust that quickly billowed around them. Shielding his eyes, he spotted Amy standing by the figurine, which was now moving toward her. She was in shock, her backpack on the ground by her feet. "Get back!" he shouted. Ian pulled Amy away and threw her to the ground, landing on top of her. Gravel showered over his back, embedding into his hair and landing on the ground like a burst of applause. His second though was that the shirt would be ruined. And this was the shock of it-that his first thought had not been about the shirt. Or the coin. Or himself. It had been about her. But that was not part of the plan. She existed for a purpose. She was a tactic, a stepping stone. She was... "Lovely," he said. Amy was staring up at him, petrified, her eyelashes flecked with dust. Ian took her hand, which was knotted into a fist. "Y-y-you don't have to do that," she whispered. "Do what?" Ian asked. "Be sarcastic. Say things like 'lovely.' You saved my life. Th-thank you." "My duty," he replied. He lowered his head and allowed his lips to brush hers. Just a bit.

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.

The bottom line is: if you were a jerk in your original life, you're probably going to be a bigger undead jerk, If you were a decent person, say a juvenile-services librarian with a secret collection of unicorn figurines, you're probably going to be a kinder, gentler vampire.

I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.

I decided to lock myself in. A forced segregation. Sabbatical. A retreat into myself. My selves. Play hide and go seek in the looking-glass. The mirror angled at the foot of my bed. Twisted reflections bouncing off into infinity. Obsessed with my image, the myriad of distored figurines who danced in front of me in rapid succession, every feature exaggerated, every slight imperfection a new delicacy.

As for Sadie, she didn’t appear interested in strategy. She leaped from puddle to puddle in her combat boots. She hummed to herself, twirled like a little kid and occasionally pulled random things out of her backpack: wax animal figurines, some string, a piece of chalk, a bright yellow bag of candy. She reminded me of someone … Then it occurred to me. She looked like a younger version of Annabeth, but her fidgeting and hyperness reminded me of … well, me. If Annabeth and I ever had a daughter, she might be a lot like Sadie. Whoa. It’s not like I’d never dreamed about kids before. I mean, you date someone for over a year, the idea is going to be in the back of your mind somewhere, right? But still – I’m barely seventeen. I’m not ready to think too seriously about stuff like that. Also, I’m a demigod. On a day-to-day basis, I’m busy just trying to stay alive. Yet, looking at Sadie, I could imagine that someday maybe I’d have a little girl who looked like Annabeth and acted like me – a cute little hellion of a demigod, stomping through puddles and flattening monsters with magic camels.

Sam grabbed one of Jericho's Civil War soldier figurines and held it up to his mouth. "Oh, Jericho," he said in a high-pitched voice. "Take me in your arms, you big he-man, you!

It is not cynical to admit that the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice!

To fuss is human; to rant, divine!

I imagine she'd do anything to keep you alive. But giving her your heart is like handing a glass figurine to a child. She'll flip it over, peer through it like a lends. Shake it to see if it makes a sound. In the end, it will slip her hands and shatter. In the end, it's your fault. You were the one who gave it to her.

Dreamt I stood in a china shop so crowded from floor to far-off ceiling with shelves of porcelain antiques, etc. that moving a muscle would cause several to fall and smash to bits. Exactly what happened but instead of a crashing noise, an august chord rang out, half cello, half celeste, D major (?), held for four beats. My wrist knocked a Ming vase affair off its pedestal-E flat. Whole string section, glorious, transcendant, angels wept. Deliberately now, smashed a figurine of an ox for the next note, then a milkmaid, then Saturday's Child-orgy of shrapnel filled the air, divine harmonies my head.

She was beautiful. Not despite her so-called flaws but because of them—those scrapes and life experiences that made her body like no other woman’s. The beauty that wasn’t ephemeral or society-dictated but the real beauty that cut across generations, across all cultures, from the beginning of humankind. The beauty that was painted in Paleolithic caves and carved in ancient Venus statuettes, those wonderful figurines of all shapes and sizes, individualized and gorgeous precisely because of that individuality. What cavemen had known, modern men had forgotten, and sadly, modern women too.

In the sunlight, snow melts, crystals evaporate into a steam, into nothing. In the firelight, vapors dance and vanish. In the core of a volcano, fragile things burst and disappear. The girl, in the gunfire, in the heat, in the concussion, folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine. What was left of her, ice, snowflake, smoke, blew away in the wind. The tiller seat was empty.

In my hand I hold a small guardian angel figurine set in a smooth, clear stone. It’s beautiful, a promise of love. Of forever.

I meant to say I am sorry Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, ‘I’m sorry your figurines broke, Mama.

It wasn't Lily who was the figurine in a diorama; it was her mother. Her mother was going round and round on that track, hearing only what she wanted to hear.

Like an envelope, a hollow figurine, and a coffin, a refrigerator can hold all sorts of things, and they may turn out to be very important depending on what kind of day you are having.

Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.(Opening page, 3)

St. Clair wanders around, picking up things and examining them like I did in Meredith's room. He inspects the collection of banana and elephant figurines lined up on my dresser. He holds up a glass elephant and raises his dark eyebrows in question.

Like an envelope, a hollow figurine, and a coffin, a refrigerator can hold all sorts of things, and they may turn out to be very important depending on what kind of day you are having. A refrigerator may hold an icepack, for example, which would be important if you had been wounded. A refrigerator may hold a bottle of water, which would be important if you were dying of thirst. And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, “If you don’t give me a basket of strawberries right now, I’m going to poke you with this large stick.

You know I saw yet another Leia figurine recently at one of those comic book conventions—which yes, I go to when I’m lonely. Anyway, this doll was on a turnstile. And when it got to a particular place on the turnstile, you could see up my dress, to my anatomically correct—though shaved—galaxy snatch. Well, as you can imagine, because this probably happens to you all the time, I was a bit taken aback by this, so I called George and I said, “You know what, man? Owning my likeness does not include owning my lagoon of mystery.

Bookstores, invariably, are a refuge. There's one in the town where they live, and the first time Lydia ventures in, it takes her breath away. She has to steady herself against a shelf. The smell of coffee and paper and ink. It's nothing like her little shop back home. It's stocked mostly with religious books, and instead of calendars and toys, they carry rosaries, Buddha figurines, yarmulkes. Still, the upright spines of the books are bedrock. Steady. There's an international poetry section. Hafiz. Heaney. Neruda. Lydia flips past the twenty love poems and reads "The Song of Despair." She reads it desperately, hungrily, bent over the books in the aisle of the quiet shop. Her fingers ready the next page while she devours the words. The book is water in the desert.

I yank open the cutlery drawer to be confronted with an anomaly worse than emails from dead people or a man with a gun sitting on my bed. It's a large carving knife with a viciously serrated edge and two broken teeth. It's tarnished with rust. It's not mine. And neither is the china figurine of a kitten with one paw playfully raised, also stained with rust. But it's not rust. It's not rust at all. Perversely, the thought that flashes through my brain is "I can haz murder weapon?" I laugh out loud, a sobbing hiccup.

From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving.

Family room surfaces shouldn’t be reserved for a lifeless parade of ceramic figurines—quite the opposite. They’re meant for four-year-olds to color, teenagers to play games with their friends, and adults to enjoy a cup of coffee.

I’m good at tailing people. I was an intelligence officer during World War I. My code name was the Crab." - Roderick Childermass

It's a Stormwing," Ozorne said. "I always wanted one.

...carved marble figures in strata that "suggests the characters were made by intelligent humans from the distant past," a section of gold thread found in strata between 320 and 360 million years old, a report in a nineteenth-century edition of Scientific American recording the discovery of a metallic vase in strata 600 million years old, a chalk ball in France in strata 45-55 million years old, a machined coin with undecipherable writing at least 200,000 years old, discovered in Illinois, a clay figurine discovered in Idaho that is atleast two million years old. The list of suppressed and conveniently forgotten discoveries goes on and on,

So, ah, who’s the lucky girl?” Sam asked, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. When Jericho ignored him, Sam grabbed one of Jericho’s Civil War soldier figurines and held it up to his mouth. “Oh, Jericho,” he said in a high-pitched voice. “Take me in your arms, you big he-man, you!” “Please put General Meade back in Gettysburg. You’re changing the course of the war. And it’s just a date.

More than a marketplace to sell used goods, eBay is one of the best reality checks out there when you’re having trouble letting go of something because you think it’s worth a lot of money. Going on to eBay tells you exactly what your possessions are worth on the open market. If that “valuable” figurine you inherited from your grandmother is selling for $9.99 on eBay, then it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

If that moment was a Russian nesting doll, I was paying attention to the smallest figurine. I did not see all the other metaphorical dolls. The one wrapped around the smallest one, and the one wrapped around the next-smallest one and the next and the next after that. What neurotypical people call the context.

And, whoa!” He looked at Mr. D. “You’re the wine dude? No way!” Mr. D turned his eyes away from me and gave Nico a look of loathing. “The wine dude?” “Dionysus, right? Oh, wow! I’ve got your figurine.” “My figurine.” “In my game, Mythomagic. And a holofoil card, too! And even though you’ve only got like five hundred attack points and everybody thinks you’re the lamest god card, I totally think your powers are sweet!” “Ah.” Mr. D seemed truly perplexed, which probably saved my life. “Well, that’s…gratifying.” “Percy,” Chiron said quickly, “you and Thalia go down to the cabins. Inform the campers we’ll be playing capture the flag tomorrow evening.” “Capture the flag?” I asked. “But we don’t have enough—” “It is a tradition,” Chiron said. “A friendly match, whenever the Hunters visit.” “Yeah,” Thalia muttered. “I bet it’s real friendly.” Chiron jerked his head toward Mr. D, who was still frowning as Nico talked about how many defense points all the gods had in his game. “Run along now,” Chiron told us. “Oh, right,” Thalia said. “Come on, Percy.” She hauled me out of the Big House before Dionysus could remember that he wanted to kill me.

It was never a question of passing. It was a question of hiding. Behind Black and white perceptions of who we were -- who they thought we were. Tropics. Plantations. Calypso. Cricket. We were the people with the musical voices and the coronation mugs on our parlor tables. I would be whatever figurine these foreign imaginations cared for me to be. It would be so simple to let others fill in for me. So easy to startle them with a flash of anger when their visions got out of hand -- but never to sustain the anger for myself. It would be a life lived within myself. A life cut off. I know who I am but you will never know who I am. I may in fact lose touch with who I am.

Think about it: If you have saved just enough to have your own house, your own car, a modicum of income to pay for food, clothes, and a few conveniences, and your everyday responsibilities start and end only with yourself… You can afford not to do anything outside of breathing, eating, and sleeping. Time would be an endless, white blanket. Without folds and pleats or sudden rips. Monday would look like Sunday, going sans adrenaline, slow, so slow and so unnoticed. Flowing, flowing, time is flowing in phrases, in sentences, in talk exchanges of people that come as pictures and videos, appearing, disappearing, in the safe, distant walls of Facebook. Dial fast food for a pizza, pasta, a burger or a salad. Cooking is for those with entire families to feed. The sala is well appointed. A day-maid comes to clean. Quietly, quietly she dusts a glass figurine here, the flat TV there. No words, just a ho-hum and then she leaves as silently as she came. Press the shower knob and water comes as rain. A TV remote conjures news and movies and soaps. And always, always, there’s the internet for uncomplaining company. Outside, little boys and girls trudge along barefoot. Their tinny, whiny voices climb up your windowsill asking for food. You see them. They don’t see you. The same way the vote-hungry politicians, the power-mad rich, the hey-did-you-know people from newsrooms, and the perpetually angry activists don’t see you. Safely ensconced in your tower of concrete, you retreat. Uncaring and old./HOW EASY IT IS NOT TO CARE

When Mrs. Rose goes to check in with “the woman” about dinner, I pull out my phone and start tapping. “Potpourri,” I say aloud. “Scribbly paintings. Creepy Hummel figurines of peasant children doing chores.” Nicholas gives me a wary look. “What are you doing?” “Taking notes on how to make our house more enticing to you. You adore this one so much that you never want to leave, so I’m working out how to replicate the magic.” I resume my phone tapping. “Bouquets of flowers bestowed by loved ones. Hmm, I’ll have to find some loved ones.

Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen

Livia dug around in the bottom of her closet while Blake put the figurine back where it belonged. He handled her belongings like he was the curator in a world-renowned museum.

The Minoans produced the figurines we now know simply as the Minoan Snake Goddesses, images which bear a striking similarity to Hekate.

I covered the scar with concealer every day because I wanted my body to be a flawless figurine, but this blemish would be with me forever.

Polly was the same age as Alma, but daintier and startlingly beautiful. She looked like a perfect figurine carved out of fine French soap, into which someone had inlaid a pair of glittering peacock-blue eyes. But it was the tiny pink pillow of her mouth that made this girl more than simply pretty; it made her an unsettling little voluptuary, a Bathsheba wrought in miniature.

Every crew brings its own small, tethered "g meter", a toy or figurine we hang in front of us so we know when we are weightless. Ours was Klyopa, a small knitted doll based on a character in a Russian children's television program, courtesy of Anastasia, Roman's 9-year-old daughter. When the string that was holding her suddenly slackened and she began to drift upward, I had a feeling I'd never felt before in space: I'd come home.

It’s like I’m drowning. The sadness is too great. Girl breathing, said Hope. She’d startled me. Dripping with snot and tears, I stared at her over my figurines. Are you listening to my thoughts, Hope? Girl told them to me. Girl isn’t drowning. Girl breathing. I feel like I’m drowning. Girl’s lungs full of air. Expanding. I took a long, deep breath, paying attention to my lungs filling with air. See? she said. Hope right.

Blake stood at Livia’s dresser with a ceramic Cinderella and Prince Charming figurine in his hands. He almost dropped it when he looked at her, dressed for him. “Thank you, Kyle,” he said, not loud enough for Kyle to hear.

The professor believed in thought. He was always telling his students that you could get to the unknown by using the known. If you just put the facts that you knew together in the proper way, you might get some truly amazing results.

You’re a bastard,’ she whispered, her hands beginning to tremble as she scooped up one of the figurines. I could tell by the costume it was Pulcinella, his body split in half. The head completely shattered. ‘You’re a selfish bastard.

The Ilhalmiut do not fill canvases with their paintings, or inscribe figures on rocks, or carve figurines in clay or in stone, because in the lives of the People there is no room for the creation of objects of no practical value. What purpose is there in creating beautiful things if these must be abandoned when the family treks out over the Barrens? But the artistic sense is present and strongly developed. It is strongly alive in their stories and songs, and in the string-figures, but they also use it on the construction of things which assist in their living and in these cases it is no less an art. The pleasure of abstract creation is largely denied to them by the nature of the land, but still they know how to make beauty. They know how to make beauty, and they also know how to enjoy it-- for it is no uncommon thing to see an Ilhalmio man squatting silently on a hill crest and watching, for hours at a time, the swift interplay of colors that sweep the sky at sunset and dawn. It is not unusual to see an Ilhalmio pause for long minutes to watch the sleek beauty of a weasel or to stare into the brilliant heart of some minuscule flower. And these things are done quite unconsciously, too. There is no word for 'beauty'--as such--in their language; it needs no words in their hearts.

I shove the wooden debris out of the way until I see the smudged face of the teddy bear. “There she is.” I carefully pull out the bear and sword. I proudly flip the bridal veil skirt to show him the scabbard. Raffe stares at the disguised sword for a second before commenting. “Do you know how many kills this sword has?” “It’s a perfect disguise, Raffe.” “This sword is not just an angel sword. She’s an archangel sword. Better than an angel sword, in case that’s not clear. She intimidates the other angel swords.” “What, the other swords quake in their scabbards when they see her?” I walk over to the pile of scattered junk by Captain Jake’s boat. “Yes, if you must know,” he says following me. “She was made for ultimate respect. How is she supposed to get that disguised as a teddy bear in a bridal gown?” “It’s not a bridal gown, it’s a skirt for her scabbard. And it’s cute.” “She hates cute. She wants to maim and scar cute.” “Nobody hates cute.” “Angel swords do.” He arches his brow and stares down at me. I guess I won’t tell him how many cutesy angel figurines and pictures we used to have in the World Before.

Artemis, along with Selene and Hekate, was one of the Greek triads representing the Old European three-bodied or triune aspect of the Goddess. We can see this represented in this figurine (Fig. 72) of Artemis as part of three-fold Hekate. First you have the pillar—the goddess mother is the axis of the universe herself. Round about are three representations of the Goddess, including Artemis, and Hekate, who represents the chthonic underworld—the magic aspect of the Goddess—and then dancing in a relaxed, fluent manner around about we see the three Graces. Artemis is the giver of abundance: Our Lady of the Wild Things, and the All-Mother of the many breasts, who bears the totality of the entities of the natural world. This is something very, very different from the image of the virgin goddess and the mere huntress that we have normally associated with her.

One little, two little, three little Indians” is not simply a familiar children’s nursery rhyme, it is also a celebration of North American genocide. This little ditty, many Indian militants argue, captures in lyrical form the belief held during the last century by most in­formed Americans that Indians were vanishing from the face of the earth. This view was popularly symbolized earlier in this century by a small figurine showing an exhausted warrior on horseback, head slumped over and bowed, entitled “End of the Trail,” which adorned the mantlepiece of many white homes. The

Since stone tools were the only technology that survived archaeologically for millions of years and across several hominin species, it was assumed that they were male technology. It said so on the box: man the toolmaker, man the hunter. Women gave birth, cowered in the backs of caves, posed as the model for a Venus figurine occasionally so that Palaeolithic ‘man’ could get his other rocks off, and maybe collected a worthless vegetable from time to time when the mammoth chops were running low. The sometimes openly stated and mostly implicit assumption was that human physical and cultural evolution was driven by male hunting. Was this the best we could do?

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers [...], they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

I sigh, realizing that the boy I'm talking about is a different iteration of myself from a separate past life, removed from who I am here. All the previous me's have been chunked off, lopped into little figurines in a Dickens-style display that represent old hurts. Oh, how I want to take a bat to the table and smash them all to smithereens.

There was no way Baz was consciously mimicking the pose of the Howl’s Moving Castle figurine, yet this was exactly what he was doing. Elijah’s imagination completed the shadows into dark wings, but otherwise it was the same: shorter, hesitant Elijah standing before the taller, hunched, aching Baz, tentatively trying to capture his attention.

Iubirea e atunci când afli odată pentru totdeauna cine ești. E atunci când devii acel tu complet pe care-l vei purta mereu cu tine prin lume. Când îl iei pe celălalt și-l amesteci cu tine, făcând un nou întreg, ca un glob mare din plastilină colorată, atunci când te plictisești să tot construiești figurine și amesteci totul, aparent fără niciun sens.

Nutty people don't rat on you. Nice, friendly, ordinary next-door neighbor types--they would rat on you and think nothing of it.

Whatever you think you are, that's what you are

Old people often have unknown treasures in their homes, and I had often wondered what valuables the old man might have sitting around: original Hummel figurines perhaps, or some pieces of sterling silver. Something to show people later, proof that I had made a connection, that I was the kind of person to whom other people gave things. Something I could sell if I needed to.

Before settling in to work, we noticed a large travel case on the mantelpiece. I unsnapped the latches and lifted the top. On one side there was a large desert scene on a marble base featuring miniature gold figurines, as well as a glass clock powered by changes in temperature. On the other side, set in a velvet case, was a necklace half the length of a bicycle chain, encrusted with what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rubies and diamonds—along with a matching ring and earrings. I looked up at Ben and Denis. “A little something for the missus,” Denis said. He explained that others in the delegation had found cases with expensive watches waiting for them in their rooms. “Apparently, nobody told the Saudis about our prohibition on gifts.” Lifting the heavy jewels, I wondered how many times gifts like this had been discreetly left for other leaders during official visits to the kingdom—leaders whose countries didn’t have rules against taking gifts, or at least not ones that were enforced. I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better. I set the necklace down and closed the case. “All right,” I said. “Let’s work.

Thandi looks at the rag dolls and the coasters and key chains and handcrafted jewelry that Delores delicately places inside the basket. How would visitors know the real stories behind the faces of the wooden masks they'd buy to have on walls; the rag dolls they'd use to decorate unused furniture in their houses; the figurines they'd place on mantels that they can marvel at and then quickly forget?

(I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other's body, coldly : lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment-by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire. )

He imagined a town called A. Around the communal fire they’re shaping arrowheads and carving tributes o the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire sharpening arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs — not carving the correct tributary figurines probably — and the people of B move farther south, where word is there’s good fishing, at least according to those who wander to B just before being cooked for dinner. Another tribe of unlucky souls stops for the night in the emptied village, looks around at the natural defenses provided by the landscape, and decides to stay awhile. It’s a while lot better than their last digs — what with the lack of roving tigers and such — plus it comes with all the original fixtures. they call the place C, after their elder, who has learned that pretending to talk to spirits is a fun gag that gets you stuff. Time passes. More invasions, more recaptures, D, E, F, and G. H stands as it is for a while. That ridge provides some protection from the spring floods, and if you keep a sentry up there you can see the enemy coming for miles. Who wouldn’t want to park themselves in that real estate? The citizens of H leave behind cool totems eventually toppled by the people of I, whose lack of aesthetic sense if made up for by military acumen. J, K, L, adventures in thatched roofing, some guys with funny religions from the eastern plains, long-haired freaks from colder climes, the town is burned to the ground and rebuilt by still more fugitives. This is the march of history. And conquest and false hope. M falls to plague, N to natural disaster — same climatic tragedy as before, apparently it’s cyclical. Mineral wealth makes it happen for the O people, and the P people are renowned for their basket weaving. No one ever — ever — mentions Q. The dictator names the city after himself; his name starts with the letter R. When the socialists come to power they spend a lot of time painting over his face, which is everywhere. They don’t last. Nobody lasts because there’s always somebody else. They all thought they owned it because they named it and that was their undoing. They should have kept the place nameless. They should have been glad for their good fortune, and left it at that. X, Y, Z.

I been thinkin'," he said. "I been in the hills, thinkin', almost you might say like Jesus went into the wilderness to think His way out of a mess of troubles. Seems like Jesus got all messed up with troubles, and He couldn't figure nothin' out, an' He got to feelin' what the hell good is it all, an' what's the use fightin' an' figurin'. Got tired, got good an' tired, an' His sperit all wore out. Jus' about come to the conclusion, the hell with it. An' so He went off into the wilderness." "I ain't sayin' I'm like Jesus," the preacher went on. "But I got tired like Him, an' I got mixed up like Him, an' I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin' stuff. Nighttime I'd lay on my back an' look up at the stars; morning I'd set an' watch the sun come up; midday I'd look out from a hill at the rollin' dry country; evenin' I'd foller the sun down. Sometimes I'd pray like I always done. On'y I couldn' figure what I was prayin' to or for. There was the hills, an' there was me, an' we wasn't separate no more. We was one thing. An' that one thing was holy." "An' I got thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin, it was deeper down than thinkin'. I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it on'y got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin' together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that's right, that's holy. An' then I got thinkin' I don't even know what I mean by holy." He paused, but the bowed heads stayed down, for they had been trained like dogs to rise at the "amen" signal. "I can't say no grace like I use' ta say. I'm glad of the holiness of breakfast. I'm glad there's love here. That's all." The heads stayed down. The preacher looked around. "I've got your breakfast cold," he said; and then he remembered. "Amen," he said, and all the heads rose up.

How could you look at a girl like that and trust her with anything other than your life? That isn't me being flippant, understand. I imagine she'd do anything to keep you alive. But giving her your heart is like handing a glass figurine to a child. She'll flip it over, peer through it like a lens. Shake it to see if it makes a sound. In the end, it will slip her hands and shatter. In the end, it's your fault. You were the one who gave it to her.

It is not cynical to admit the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added or removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and visions and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren.

Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales have a limited-to-nonexistent sense of taste. The photo is a black-and-white still life of twenty-five objects recovered from sperm whale stomachs. It’s like Jonah set up housekeeping: a pitcher, a cup, a tube of toothpaste, a strainer, a wastebasket, a shoe, a decorative figurine.

As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That’s it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that. I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds! I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant Star Wars figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I’d give a kidney to and best guy friends I’d ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That’s being a girl. That’s being a person. It’s the same damn thing. I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I’m happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh. Then I will pick it back up and keep climbing. There are many more mountains to overcome.

There are these Precious Moments figurines, they’re like porcelain, little kids with giant eyes handing each other a heart that says LOVE on it, or rolling around with a puppy? Maria stumbles into a whole aisle of them. Tears start welling up in her eyes, again, which is totally not tough and totally not punk but which also you totally can’t lie about. Like, they’re depictions of this idealized childhood innocence, right? This idea that little kids have the potential for sadness in their giant eyes, but really they just know these pure emotions: love, happiness, whatever. It’s totally hokey and stupid and obviously a construction. Real little kids are as dirty, impure, and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be. But this sort of thing gets her all melodramatic and choked up specifically because of how fucked up she was convinced she was when she was little. She didn’t know she was trans, she couldn’t put into words that she was a little girl, but she did know that something was horribly wrong and she blamed herself for it. Other kids could stomp around and punch eachother and sleep at night, but she was this self-conscious mess who liked books a lot because sometimes people in books seemed as bewildered by the world and themselves as she was. She was never a little kid who could get a puppy and be happy about it. If you’d given her a puppy, she would immediately have started worrying about what if she trained it wrong, what if it ran away. She would already be sad that it would die.

Ages. But this is just the kind of thing that a town like Cairo, Illinois, would peddle as a souvenir. They pronounce it Kay-ro, by the way. It’s a town way down in the southern part of Illinois, and it happens to have the same name as the capital of modern-day Egypt.

It is an amazement of riches, glacé fruits and marzipan flowers and mountains of loose chocolates of all shapes and colors, and rabbits, ducks, hens, chicks, lambs, gazing out at me with merry-grave chocolate eyes like the terra-cotta armies of ancient China, and above it all a statue of a woman, graceful brown arms holding a sheaf of chocolate wheat, hair rippling. The detail is beautifully rendered, the hair added in a darker grade of chocolate, the eyes brushed on in white. The smell of chocolate is overwhelming, the rich fleshly scent of it drags down the throat in an exquisite trail of sweetness.

withdrew a wooden figurine. He kept it hidden from sight. “What is that?” she asked. “Did you make it?” He nodded. “Show me.” They might be friends, but Bon was a dull fieldclaw and Ahk was heir to the Kym family business. He couldn’t help but obey. Bon lifted his claw, opening it to display the figurine. Plucking it from his grip, she leaned forward, squinting to take in the exquisite detail. Carved and painted, it depicted a bright female. The veins in the upper wings were meticulously captured. The antennae, whisps of thin wood that looked like they’d snap if she breathed on them, expressed exuberant humour.

He undid the lock and pulled open the cover to reveal a large stack of envelopes, each one labeled with a different name: Franklin Hobart, Brian Yancey, Everett Singer, Larry Steczynski…it was this last one he grabbed and pulled open, emptying its contents into his wallet and pockets. “Larry Steczynski?” I asked incredulously. Sage smiled. “You don’t think it suits me?” “Oh, I think you suits you perfectly. How many aliases do you have?” “I’m a bit of a collector.” I placed a hand on his wrist, stopping him as he transferred something into his wallet. “Does Larry Steczynski carry a black AmEx?” “He might.” “My mom doesn’t even carry a black AmEx.” “Apparently your mom doesn’t move in the same circles as Larry Steczynski.” “Sage,” Ben called from across the room. He had knelt down to gaze closely at a sculpted figurine that sat on an end table, and his voice broke with awe. “This...this is a real Michelangelo, isn’t it?” “Yeah, yeah it is.” “But it’s a Michelangelo!” “Yep.” “And that painting,” Ben said, nodding to a piece on the wall featuring a sketch of what looked like a somewhat cherubic version of Sage himself. “That’s a real Rubens?” “It is.” “It looks like you.” “Strong genetics in the family line,” Sage explained.

You're fixing everything I set down." He nods at my hands, which are readjusting the elephant. "It wasn't polite of me to come in and start touching your things." "Oh,it's okay," I say quickly, letting go of the figurine. "You can touch anything of mine you want." He freezes. A funny look runs across his face before I realize what I've said. I didn't mean it like that. Not that that/i> would be so bad. But I like Toph,and St. Clair has a girlfriend. And even if the situation were different, Mer still has dibs. I'd never do that to her after how nice she was my first day.And my second. And every other day this week. Besides,he's just an attractive boy. Nothing to get worked up over. I mean, the streets of Europe are filled with beautiful guys, right? Guys with grooming regimens and proper haircuts and stylish coats.Not that I've seen anyone even remotely as good-looking as Monsieur Etienne St.Clair.But still. He turns his face away from mine. Is it my imagination or does he look embarrassed? But why would he be embarrassed? I'm the one with the idiotic mouth. "Is that your boyfriend?" He points to my laptop's wallpaper, a photo of my coworkers and me goofing around. It was taken before the midnight release of the lastest fantasy-novel-to-film adaptation. Most of us were dressed like elves or wizards. "The one with his eyes closed?" "WHAT?" He thinks I'd date a guy like Hercules Hercules is an assistant manager. He's ten years older than me and,yes, that's his real name. And even though he's sweet and knows more about Japanese horror films than anyone,he also has a ponytail. A ponytail. "Anna,I'm kidding.This one. Sideburns." He points to Toph,the reason I love the picture so much.Our heads are turned into each other, and we're wearing secret smiles,as if sharing a private joke. "Oh.Uh...no.Not really.I mean, Toph was my almost-boyfriend.I moved away before..." I trail off, uncomfortable. "Before much could happen.

Goddesses rather than male deities were the central focus in European religion from about 6500 BC to 3500 BC. Archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas[xxii], was one of the first scholars to recognise the significance of the fact that twenty times more female than male figurines have been excavated from European archaeological sites. The many engravings, reliefs and sculptures frequently de-emphasised facial features, while exaggerating gender characteristics such as breasts, buttocks, hips, and vulva. These female figurines had traditionally been seen by archaeologists as some sort of sexual fetishes, a projection of the current degraded view of feminine.

Riding high and above the waves on extemporaneous notions of an afterlife, Michael brought one foot forward and let it dangle over the roof’s edge. He knew that he did not have much time before the other would follow. Some patients below could see the figure atop the building from the courtyard. They started to rile with anticipation, their irate murmurings incomprehensible. A groundskeeper looked up to see what justified the commotion. Michael could hear the shouts from below. He almost toppled when the wind picked up again, but recovered and kept one foot dangling with the other anchored to the roof. The hoots came louder now, almost calling him toward them like sirens guiding ships in the night. From below it was impossible to make out the face of the balancing figurine now poised in suspended descent. Another gust came. He closed his eyes, felt the levity manifesting, and felt the complete freedom inside. He could feel himself gliding down like the sail of a weightless craft, forever plunging into the great beyond, below where mermaids sing and summon their lovers home, further down into the depths of some complacent serenity, further down where thoughts float away and never return and the lightness is so grand that there is no other worldly place imaginable, for there is no world left to be considered. There is only the soul, free from the prison of the body, and it is released to travel another millennium through time, carrying with it the progress and industry gathered from the mind previously occupied. The time it spans inconceivable. He let his other foot go from the roof and felt himself completely let go.

Okay, next one’s . . . a little figure of a cat.” “Can you tell what it is?” “Kind of . . . It feels like it’s something for talking. Communicating? Does it let you talk to cats?” “Not bad,” I said. That had been right on target. “It’s a summoning focus. Toss it over and I’ll show you.” Luna slid the figurine across the desk and I picked it up. It was made of alabaster, and I traced a finger across the smooth surface to the cat’s chest and tapped it. “See this point? When you channel your magic there, it sends out a call to the nearest feline within range of about the right size and draws it to you.” “So it summons a housecat?” “As long as there’s one around.” “That sounds cool. So what, you can get it to spy on people and stuff?” “No, it acts like a normal cat. It checks to see if you’ve brought it anything to eat, and if not it buggers off.

Mitty had an art teacher once who claimed that there are two kinds of people: those who paint and those who sculpt. It's one thing to look at a blank canvas and imagine a landscape, she said. It's another to look at a mound of clay and see a torso. There are the brains that want to invent, and the brains that want to reveal. Mitty got the sense that her teacher favored sculptors, something about a lack of ego, succumbing to simply uncovering what was already there. She'd noticed that it was the girls in class who chose to work with clay, but it seemed to Mitty that beneath that pattern, there was a darker truth. While the boys felt confident adding to their own creations, the girls were only ever carving away at theirs. This constant process of subtraction until every curve was smooth and wet, the scrap pile tossed into the trash, the little figurine delivered into a hot tomb to bake, all of her perfections preserved.

Shortly after he had dispatched his “letter of tears,” Paul’s fortunes plummeted to a new low. Claudius’s last years had been clouded by court intrigues, and in October 54, he was poisoned by his wife and succeeded by Nero, his adopted seventeen-year-old son. The accession of the new emperor was hailed with relief and joy and an empire-wide resurgence of the imperial cult. But Rome was in trouble: The Parthians threatened the eastern frontier and there were uprisings in Judea. Scapegoats were needed, and Marcus Junius Silanus, governor of Asia, was murdered by Nero’s agents on suspicion of treason and, in a roundup of local malcontents, Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus. Luke, always the champion of Rome and reluctant to admit that Paul was ever regarded as an enemy of the empire, tells us nothing of this. Instead, he claims that Paul’s mission in Ephesus came to an end after a riot in the Temple of Artemis, when the silversmiths who crafted figurines of the goddess accused him of putting them out of business by undermining the cult.24

He guessed the NKVD didn’t even know that Waffen-SS men could be identified by the blood-group tattoos on the underside of their left arms, usually near the armpit. Richter didn’t have one. He’d been classed as a non-combatant, as he’d said, at least for a portion of the war. He decided it could be weeks before they found out who he was. But Volsky’s confidence appeared to have been restored too, now. He said, ‘And the vat of incense?’ ‘I had the incense brought from the remnants of a Christmas smoker factory. Silly little hollow figurines invented by toymakers in the Ore Mountains. Cone incense burns down inside the figurines and the smoke emerges from the open mouths. There was a glut of them,’ Richter said, truthfully. ‘Berliners were shocked and saddened after Stalingrad. But they lost the will to celebrate after the Battle of Kursk. They knew the Red Army was coming. The puerile little incense smokers were redundant, together with the incense they were to hold. Except it didn’t go to waste. The vat was taken from a merchant’s house. It’s from Hong Kong, I think.’ Volsky leaned back in his chair. He said, ‘Why go to all the trouble?’ That’s a good question, Richter thought. He stifled a smile. ‘To mask the smell.

She sighed “Can’t you just think about sex like a normal guy?” He blinked. “Excuse me?” “How are you not thinking about sex right now?” “You don’t know what I’m thinking about.” “Yeah, but I know what you’re feeling. And you’re feeling…happy. Where’s all the desire and want?” He picked up another arrow. “Are you seriously mad at me right now because I’m not having lustful thoughts?” “No. I’m just confused. I mean, I’m thinking about sex. But you’re over there coating arrows in blood and thinking about God knows what—“ “Star Wars figurines.” “What?” “That’s what I was thinking about.” She blinked in confusion. “Star Wars figurines make you happy?” He smiled and went back to the arrows on the table. “No. You make me happy. My happy feelings are because of you. My desire and want feelings—which I have plenty of—are also because of you, but I have those contained right now because I’m trying not to overwhelm you with emotions.” “Oh.” “Trust me,” he grabbed another arrow. “You don’t want me to think about sex when you can feel my emotions. It’s very intense. I could barely handle it with you and I had five hundred years of practice.” She shot her eyes to him. “What are you trying to say? That I’m some kind of baby? I can handle it.” He shook his head and smiled. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Try me.” This was a dangerous game, but since only his life was at stake… “Okay.” He shrugged and started thinking about sex. With Scarlet. He watched as she stood frozen and the color drained from her face as everything he felt rolled into her. Then bright red color returned to her face and she looked like she might catch fire. He kept his eyes on her as his feelings stayed in the hottest parts of his being. She looked at him with hungry eyes and moved her mouth to speak but no sound came out. He watched her breathing grow heavier. She dropped the arrows she held and stared at him. He changed his pattern of thought and tried to calm his emotions so she wouldn’t do anything she regretted. Once his thoughts were back on happy non-sexual things, he glanced at Scarlet, who was still frozen in place with red cheeks and parted lips. “Scar?” He leaned to the side to look in her far away eyes. “You okay?” She mouthed something and nodded, then tried again. “Yeah.” Her voice cracked. She was staring at the wall with big eyes. “I’m, uh…I’m good. I’m great.” He went back to the arrows and smiled. “Told you.” Scarlet blinked a few times and looked at Tristan. “We definitely need a chaperone.

A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. 4. An ivory figurine of a ‘lion-man’ (or ‘lioness-woman’) from the Stadel Cave in Germany (c.32,000 years ago). The body is human, but the head is leonine. This is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat. The amount of information that one must obtain and store in order to track the ever-changing relationships of even a few dozen individuals is staggering. (In a band of fifty individuals, there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships, and countless more complex social combinations.) All apes show a keen interest in such social information, but they have trouble gossiping effectively. Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens probably also had a hard time talking behind each other’s backs – a much maligned ability which is in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers.

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation – recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically – and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other). ‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.