“
A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
”
”
A.S. Byatt (Possession)
“
Desperately, I needed a reversal of fortunes. Then suddenly, I knew what I needed to do. So, I stopped at the Northside cemetery.
Mom was buried there. I gave Deya another pass and left her outside the gates of the cemetery. I
wasn’t certain but I didn’t want to mix my perceived notion of Deya’s Voodoo with Mom’s
Ghosts, Dead Dawg, and Haints. Too many demons in the same location didn’t appear to be a smart thing. Once inside,I said what I needed to say, laid a rose, and headed back to retrieve my sweetheart. But I knew Deya. She had a fear of ghouls and hitchhikers hanging out in the graveyard. So wisely, I scanned her person for a Greek cross, miniature doll, or chicken foot in her possession. Fortunately, she passed my inspections. So, I left the graveyard, took the wheel, and got the hell out of that area in a haze.
”
”
Author Harold Phifer (My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift)
“
I hate that you can do what you're supposed to do and I can't. I hate that you're going to leave me behind. I hate that everyone calls it growing up, but it seems like dying. It feels like each one of you is being possessed and I'm next.
”
”
Holly Black (Doll Bones)
“
It's not fair. We had a story, and our story was important. And I hate that both of you can just walk away and take part of my story with you and not even care. I hate that you can do what you're supposed to do and I can't. I hate that you're going to leave me behind. I hate that everyone calls it growing up, but it seems like dying. It feels like each of you is being possessed and I'm next.
”
”
Holly Black (Doll Bones)
“
Old lady, if I die I'd like you to do one small thing for me. I want you to build a one-hundred-acre museum dedicated to my memory. Bronze my clothing and possessions. Have at least three hundred marble statues erected of me in my most dashing poses. One of these statues should stand one hundred feet tall and greet ships as they float down the Hudson River. One of the fourteen wings of the museum should have an amusement park with the world's fastest roller coaster inside. None of these rides should be equipped with safety devices. You can license some of the space to fast-food restaurants and ice-cream parlors but nothing should be healthy or nutritious. The gift shop should sell stuffed Puck dolls packed with broken glass and asbestos. There's a more detailed list in my room." Puck saidduble
”
”
Michael Buckley (Sisters Grimm Books 1, 2, and 3 Three-Pack (The Sisters Grimm, #1-3))
“
It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way)
“
He who writes is the martyr, seen through the eyes of the unassuming doll.
”
”
A.K. Kuykendall (The Possession (The Writer's Block trilogy, #1))
“
Time is tick, tick, ticking away. How many souls will I capture today? Will they be a challenge or will they be given? Only time will tell as the clock keeps tick, tick, ticking. Your god has arrived with enough hatred for y’all, with enough evil for the big and small, so come one, come all. I will shred your souls and place them in my satchel, call you a settler and make you my peddler. Come one, come all, come stand behind your god. I will lead you into the darkness of Earth's end. Come one, come all, my wilted flowers, come claim your title, speak out and cheer it. Come one, come all, let’s have a ball, my wilted flowers . . . Sweet, Unconquerable Spirits.
”
”
A.K. Kuykendall (The Possession (The Writer's Block trilogy, #1))
“
To thine beautiful unawares beloved deity, in one’s benevolent craft, each of us must reveal our own truth.
”
”
A.K. Kuykendall (The Possession (The Writer's Block trilogy, #1))
“
Have you ever heard this one? When you drive past a cemetery, you have to hold your breath. If you don’t, the spirits of the newly dead can get in your body through your mouth and then they can possess you.
”
”
Holly Black (Doll Bones)
“
In the past few decades quite a few people have suggested -- citing most often the offence of impossible proportions -- that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls "provoked rejection, hatred, and violence" and many girls preferred Barbie torture -- by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving -- over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were 'plastic.' The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. 'On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,' one of the researchers remarked. 'She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.
”
”
Eula Biss (The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009)
“
Pablo's many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérese and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just offstage in our own life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all women he had collected in his private museum. But he didn't cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.
”
”
Françoise Gilot (Life With Picasso)
“
I needed overall sincerity. I needed intimacy. I didn’t need a sex doll, no matter how good the sex was.
”
”
Pepper Winters (Take Me: Twelve Tales of Dark Possession)
“
If you don’t, the spirits of the newly dead can get in your body through your mouth and then they can possess you.
”
”
Holly Black (Doll Bones)
“
And yet as pristine as she appeared, her demeanor was not delicate. She was no porcelain doll. She was a distant glacier. Remote, quiet, and yet possessed of great and unknowable activity beneath the surface.
”
”
Graham Moore (The Last Days of Night)
“
that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone—that, in short, she might possess “education” and other good things ending in “tion,” and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll.
”
”
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
“
I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you tell me more about this 'profanity'?"
Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. "I'll assume you don't need a definition. Perhaps you'd prefer an example?"
"That would be so helpful, thank you very much."
Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to be born out of wedlock. AS for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of names so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would've wished he'd been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a verity of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would've given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to a single-cell stage, forever free of taint of mitosis, let alone procreation.
Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed I'd snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain.
"Guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh," I said, by which I meant: "You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain." Nervously, I climbed back into my chair, the two halves of my pencil sticking out of ears like an arrow that had shot clean through my head.
Mrs. Miller allowed herself a small self-congratulatory smile.
”
”
Dale Peck (Sprout)
“
We need to help her,” Bryce panted to Azriel. “I promise you, she’s fine,” Azriel countered, urging them further into the tunnel. Out of the impact zone, Bryce realized. The Wyrm must have sensed the sword’s approach, because it bucked against the bones and claws pinning it to the rock. It managed to nudge the undead creature back, but only for a heartbeat. Nesta raised her free hand again, and the undead creature slammed the Wyrm back into the ground. The Wyrm thrashed, desperate now. With a dancer’s grace, Nesta scaled the undead beast’s tail, running along the knobs of its spine like rocks in a stream. Getting to higher ground, to a better angle. The Wyrm shrieked, but Nesta had reached the undead beast’s white skull. And then she was jumping, sword arcing above her, then down, down— Straight into the head of the Wyrm. A shudder of silver fire rushed down the Wyrm. That cold, dry wind shivered through the caves again, death in its wake. The Wyrm slumped to the ground. The silence was worse than the sound. Azriel was instantly gone, wings tucking in tight as he rushed toward Nesta and the undead beast that still held the Wyrm in its grip. “Take it off,” Azriel ordered her. The female turned her head toward him with a smooth motion that Bryce had only seen from possessed dolls in horror movies. “Take it off,” Azriel snarled.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3))
“
She hasn't cried once. SHe doesn't understand that Margaret is dead. At that age, they can't fully understand the concept of death. It's a good thing really.
Jane fully understood the concept of death and she felt truly injured that Aunt Bess considered her unmoved. Jane thought it should be perfectly clear to everyone that rearranging the furniture in her dollhouse was her expression of grief. She had been moving the Mother Doll (it was a nuclear family of dolls that consisted of a mother, a father, a boy, and a girl) and all the Mother Doll's possessions into the dollhouse's attic. Jane wondered why tears were considered a superior form of grief to the rearrangement of one's dollhouse.
Feeling terribly misunderstood, Jane began to cry.
Oh listen, said Aunt Bess, she begins to understand.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Margarettown)
“
It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined—a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3))
“
It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain—the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess—whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece)
“
The last week of shooting, we did a scene in which I drag Amanda Wyss, the sexy, blond actress who played Tina, across the ceiling of her bedroom, a sequence that ultimately became one of the most visceral from the entire Nightmare franchise. Tina’s bedroom was constructed as a revolving set, and before Tina and Freddy did their dance of death, Wes did a few POV shots of Nick Corri (aka Rod) staring at the ceiling in disbelief, then we flipped the room, and the floor became the ceiling and the ceiling became the floor and Amanda and I went to work.
As was almost always the case when Freddy was chasing after a nubile young girl possessed by her nightmare, Amanda was clad only in her baby-doll nightie. Wes had a creative camera angle planned that he wanted to try, a POV shot from between Amanda’s legs. Amanda, however, wasn’t in the cameramen’s union and wouldn’t legally be allowed to operate the cemera for the shot. Fortunately, Amy Haitkin, our director of photography’s wife, was our film’s focus puller and a gifted camera operator in her own right. Being a good sport, she peeled off her jeans and volunteered to stand in for Amanda. The makeup crew dapped some fake blood onto her thighs, she lay down on the ground, Jacques handed her the camera, I grabbed her ankles, and Wes called, “Action.”
After I dragged Amy across the floor/ceiling, I spontaneously blew her a kiss with my blood-covered claw; the fake blood on my blades was viscous, so that when I blew her my kiss of death, the blood webbed between my blades formed a bubble, a happy cinematic accident. The image of her pale, slender, blood-covered legs, Freddy looming over her, straddling the supine adolescent girl, knife fingers dripping, was surreal, erotic, and made for one of the most sexually charged shots of the movie. Unfortunately it got left on the cutting-room floor. If Wes had left it in, the MPAA - who always seemed to have it out for Mr. Craven - would definitely have tagged us with an X rating. You win some, you lose some.
”
”
Robert Englund (Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams)
“
sitting here watching the second hand on the TIMEX go
around and
around...
this will hardly be a night to remember
sitting here searching for blackheads on the back of my neck
as other men enter the sheets with dolls of flame
I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.
I am out of cigarettes and don't even have a gun to point.
this writer's block is my only possession.
the second hand on the TIMEX still goes around and around...
I always wanted to be a writer
now I'm one who can't.
might as well go downstairs and watch late night tv with the wife
she'll ask me how it went
I'll wave a hand nonchalantly
settle down next to her
and watch the glass people fail
as I have failed.
I'm going to walk down the stairway now
what a sight:
an empty man being careful not to trip and bang his empty head.
”
”
Charles Bukowski (You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense)
“
If Mom is convinced that ballet lessons are a must, she should
take them.
Although it may look odd to see a thirty-year old woman hang- ing onto a bar and flinging a slightly plump leg in the air, the sight is not as pathetic as seeing her seven-year old daughter grimly going through such motions just to please her mother, when she would prefer to be at home designing new doll clothes.
Although some parents are never quite ready to accept this fact, the child is not one of our possessions. We don’t own him; we never will. We gave birth to his body; he may share some of our physical characteristics; but he does not inherit our desires.
He’s a different person, a separate entity, with his own likes and dislikes.
It’s a grave mistake to try to override a child’s power of choice in what he wants to be and do. Some parents do this in an attempt to live their lives through the child.
”
”
Ruth Minshull
“
And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is they who form her, use her, and give her what value she has? The pioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spent most of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs and halfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself.” The nature of the act does not change the nature of the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of sensibility and power. Roland Barthes, with himself as the lover, essentially endorses the same view of the object’s value and purpose: “Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.
”
”
Andrea Dworkin (Pornography: Men Possessing Women)
“
Quote from "The Dish Keepers of Honest House" ....TO TWIST THE COLD is easy when its only water you want. Tapping of the toothbrush echoes into Ella's mind like footsteps clacking a cobbled street on a bitter, dry, cold morning. Her mind pushes through sleep her body craves. It catches her head falling into a warm, soft pillow.
"Go back to bed," she tells herself.
"You're still asleep," Ella mumbles, pushes the blanket off, and sits up.
The urgency to move persuades her to keep routines. Water from the faucet runs through paste foam like a miniature waterfall. Ella rubs sleep-deprieved eyes, then the bridge of her nose and glances into the sink.
Ella's eyes astutely fixate for one, brief millisecond. Water becomes the burgundy of soldiers exiting the drain. Her mouth drops in shock. The flow turns green. It is like the bubbling fungus of flockless, fishless, stagnating ponds.
Within the iridescent glimmer of her thinking -- like a brain losing blood flow, Ella's focus is the flickering flashing of gray, white dust, coal-black shadows and crows lifting from the ground. A half minute or two trails off before her mind returns to reality.
Ella grasps a toothbrush between thumb and index finger. She rests the outer palm against the sink's edge, breathes in and then exhales. Tension in the brow subsides, and her chest and shoulders drop; she sighs. Ella stares at pasty foam. It exits the drain as if in a race to clear the sink of negativity -- of all germs, slimy spit, the burgundy of imagined soldiers and oppressive plaque.
GRASPING THE SILKY STRAND between her fingers, Ella tucks, pulls and slides the floss gently through her teeth. Her breath is an inch or so of the mirror. Inspections leave her demeanor more alert. Clouding steam of the image tugs her conscience. She gazes into silver glass. Bits of hair loosen from the bun piled at her head's posterior.
What transforms is what she imagines. The mirror becomes a window. The window possesses her Soul and Spirit. These two become concerned -- much like they did when dishonest housekeepers disrupted Ella's world in another story.
Before her is a glorious bird -- shining-dark-as-coal, shimmering in hues of purple-black and black-greens. It is likened unto The Raven in Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem of 1845.
Instead of interrupting a cold December night with tapping on a chamber door, it rests its claws in the decorative, carved handle of a backrest on a stiff dining chair. It projects an air of humor and concern. It moves its head to and fro while seeking a clearer understanding.
Ella studies the bird. It is surrounded in lofty bends and stretches of leafless, acorn-less, nearly lifeless, oak trees. Like fingers and arms these branches reach below.
[Perhaps they are reaching for us? Rest assured; if they had designs on us, I would be someplace else, writing about something more pleasant and less frightening. Of course, you would be asleep.]
Balanced in the branches is a chair. It is from Ella's childhood home. The chair sways. Ella imagines modern-day pilgrims of a distant shore. Each step is as if Mother Nature will position them upright like dolls, blown from the stability of their plastic, flat, toe-less feet. These pilgrims take fate by the hand.
LIFTING A TOWEL and patting her mouth and hands, Ella pulls the towel through the rack. She walks to the bedroom, sits and picks up the newspaper. Thumbing through pages that leave fingertips black, she reads headlines:
"Former Dentist Guilty of Health Care Fraud."
She flips the page, pinches the tip of her nose and brushes the edge of her chin -- smearing both with ink. In the middle fold directly affront her eyes is another headline:
"Dentist Punished for Misconduct."
She turns the page. There is yet another:
"Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink and using contaminated dental instruments on patients."
This world contains those who are simply insane! Every profession has those who stray from goals....
”
”
Helene Andorre Hinson Staley
“
I hold my breath while he hooks his hands under my thighs. When he resumes, it's faster, harder, and a whole new level of euphoria.
I press my eyes shut just as they start to roll back. That spot. That elusive spot every man had such a hard time locating is front and center now. I silently dub him the G-spot whisperer. Another deep thrust hits it again. Good thing I'm not trying to speak anymore, because I've lost all my words. All I have to offer are huffs of hot air and whimpering. Lots and lots of whimpering.
The edge of Callum's mouth turns up, and I have to swallow to keep from choking at the divine sight. He looks like a god in this moment. His skin is a golden glow, painted in specks of sweat, highlighting every single cut muscle he possesses. And his expression---a cross between concentration and satisfaction. It's hard physical work he's doing, but he relishes it. I can tell by the glimmer in his eyes, the way his hands cradle my legs so I'm comfortably supported. I can tell by the pinch of his jaw, those soft grunts he let loose, that this is blowing his mind too.
For the second time in one night, pressure builds inside me. The feeling is almost too much, but all I want is more. These long, deliberate thrusts are the greatest physical sensations my body has ever experienced. I could explode at any moment, but I want this to last. Forever, if possible.
Arching my back, I press my head against the pillow. I cry out, sounding like a rabid banshee.
A muttered curse falls from his lips. "That's it. Don't hold back."
Pressure and heat collide, and I couldn't hold back if I tried. The deep thrusts keep coming like an endless loop of crashing waves. Callum and my G-spot are new best friends, it seems. Over and over, he hits it. Over and over, the sensations build to an overwhelming peak. His pace shifts from impressive to phenomenal. If Callum were a sex doll, I'd buy a dozen. His stamina, his technique, his adoration of me and my body, it's all perfection.
When I burst, I'm even louder than before. And just like before, I'm ablaze from the inside out. Ecstasy pulses through every inch of skin and bone. My blood pumps hot, like lava flowing through my veins. Every muscle tightens, then loosens. Panting, I clutch Callum's forearms and watch his face as he hits his own peak.
”
”
Sarah Smith (Simmer Down)
“
The Man-Moth
Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
”
”
Elizabeth Bishop (The Complete Poems 1927-1979)
“
She’s a beautiful, broken doll. One that I want to possess. One I’m determined to claim and keep all to myself.
”
”
Jagger Cole (Vicious Hearts (Dark Hearts, #2))
“
I did not know why I destroyed those dolls. But I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, “Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?” I could have spoken up, “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward.
”
”
Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)
“
Now, I have a new doll. My prized possession. Silver. My beautiful little doll.
”
”
Rina Kent (Ruthless Empire (Royal Elite, #6))
“
Also, what the fuck? Who bought their daughter a possessed killer doll? Then again, I wouldn’t put it past Caroline Kensington.
”
”
Ana Huang (King of Sloth (Kings of Sin, #4))
“
I'm nothing but a doll to him. A toy. An accessory. A possession.
”
”
Minka Kent (People Like Them)
“
It was like being friends with two Ken dolls sometimes, I fucking swear. It didn’t help that that was literally their fucking last name: Charming.
”
”
Madison Faye (Beasting Beauty (Possessing Beauty, #1))
“
Looking stoic, she was sitting in the seat closest to the casket.
Genevieve.
My body went rigid, an unexpected surge of possessiveness running through me. Like Liam, Genevieve also had blonde hair. My boyfriend had been fucked over by Barbie and Ken. And I was more like the Bratz doll rebound.
”
”
Vi Keeland (Stuck-Up Suit)
“
What's a jagoff?" Stich asked.
"It's like a jerkoff, except it's you," Kat said.
”
”
Nelson W. Pyles (Demons, Dolls, & Milkshakes)
“
It’s difficult to imagine that Artificial Intelligence will take the place of people but many believe that it’s only a short time before computers will outthink us. They already can beat our best chess players and have been able to out calculate us since calculators first came onto the scene. IBM’s Watson is on the cutting edge of Cognitive Computers, being used to out think our physicians but closer to home, for the greatest part; our cars are no longer assembled by people but rather robots. Our automobiles can be considered among our first robots, since they took the place of horses. Just after the turn of the last century when the population in the United States crossed the 100 M mark the number of horses came to 20M. Now we have a population of 325 M but only 9 M horses. You might ask what happened. Well back in 1915 there were 2.4 M cars but this jumped to 3.6 M in just one year. Although horses still out-numbered cars the handwriting was on the wall!
You might think that this doesn’t apply to us but why not? The number of robots increase, taking the place of first our workers on the assembly line and then workers in the food industry and this takes us from tractors and combines on the farms to the cooking and serving hamburgers at your favorite burger joint. People are becoming redundant! That’s right we are becoming superfluous! Worldwide only 7 out of 100 people have college degrees and here in the United States only 40% of our working population possesses a sheep skin, although mine is printed on ordinary paper. With education becoming ever more expensive, we as a population are becoming ever more uneducated. A growing problem is that as computers and robots become smarter, as they are, we are no longer needed to be anything more than a consumer and where will the money come from for that? I recently read that this death spiral will run its course within 40 years! Nice statistics that we’re looking at….
Looking at the bright side of things you can now buy an atomically correct, life sized doll, as perhaps a robotic non-complaining, companion for under $120. In time these robotic beings will be able to talk back but hopefully there will be an off switch. As interesting as this sounds it will most likely not be for everyone, however it may appeal to some of our less capable, not to have to actually interface with real live people. The fact is that most people will soon outlive their usefulness! We as a society are being challenged and there will soon be little reason for our being. When machines make machines that can out think us; when we become dumb and superfluous, then what? Are we ready for this transition? It’s scary but If nothing else, it’s something to think about….
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
The most intensely value-laden artifacts of human creativity - works of art - are now the purist examples of that old capitalist alchemy: turning human value into exchange value. At a certain point, and that point has been passed, the art market will only be a mathematical exchange. Art is worth money, but what’s money worth? Money is the ultimate numbers game. What the furor over the art market brings tantalizingly close to the surface is the fact that it is not just the value of art that is dependant on a shared fantasy, it is also money itself.
Warhol is not the name of an artist, it is the name of a currency. “Warhol” is a big number because its denomination (soup cans, Brillo box simulacrums, etc.) is presumed to be stable and growing. But it can inflate or deflate like any stock or bond or national currency. Jeff Koons is also a currency but less stable. The only thing that really changes hands are the numbers that are for some reason associated with these opaque talismans called “artworks.” The billionaire buyers of these works have been reduced to South sea natives who insist on the magical properties of certain queer objects - a cornhusk doll with pearls for eyes and a colourful ribbon about its head - but are unable to say why they are so important or why their world would collapse without them. Investors in the art market need to fear bot only the economic boogies of bubbles and ponzi schemes but also that dreaded moment when they look at one another in panic and say, “What were we thinking? What is this stuff? What could have possessed us to say that a glass balloon dog is worth thens of millions? Sell! Sell!
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Curtis White (We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data)
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Americans love the story of the immigrant who comes through Ellis Island with no possessions but struggles to success and happiness. It is the story that most defines us, and we tell it to ourselves over and over. But for the real immigrants, each story was different, and the happiness of the ending changed with every telling.
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Gail Collins (America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines)
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Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let him take up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the old gods must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his true possessions, should be Christian and simple. And just as a child would cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the great child, must cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety; that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the world.
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G.K. Chesterton
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Not surprisingly, when Barbie achieved superstar status, her houses became more ostentatious. Yet even Barbie's three-story town house, with its Tara-like pillars and ersatz wrought-iron birdcage elevator, is an outsider's interpretation of upper-class life. Authentic valuables are to Barbie's possessions what a pungent slab of gorgonzola is to "cheese food"; her furniture and artwork would not look out of place in a Ramada Inn. For all her implicit disposable income, her tastes remain doggedly middle- to lower-middle-class. As pictured in the catalogue, the town house also reflects Dynasty thinking. Both Ken and Barbie are absurdly overdressed—he in a parodic "tuxedo," she in a flouncy confection that barely fits into the elevator.
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M.G. Lord (Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll)
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and she lost her footing and dropped her Kewpie doll. It fell between a crosshatch of sticks and logs too small to climb through. She began bawling. She’d gotten the doll less than two weeks ago for her sixth birthday, and it was her prized possession. I told her it was okay, I’d get it, and so I climbed off the dam and made
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Jeremy Bates (The Catacombs (World's Scariest Places #2))
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When [the Nun of Monza] was born, her father the prince wanted to give her a name which would carry immediate suggestion of the cloistered life, and which had been borne by a saint of noble birth; so he called her Gertrude [after a famous medieval mystic]. Dolls dressed as nuns were the first toys that she received; then she was given little images of female saints, always nuns again. These presents were always accompanied by urgent instructions to look after them well, as precious possessions, and by the affirmative question: “Pretty, aren’t they?
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Joseph Luzzi (My Two Italies)
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Nope. You’ll still be mine, even in death, doll. Remember what I said.” Hell slid the ring onto my ring finger, caging the digit in white gold. “I will haunt you until your heart stops beating. Possess you more than I do now. And then, you’ll be mine again. There’s no escaping now.
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Cori Zahara (The Darkness Beyond the Daisies)
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There is a doll. The wicked she conjures is never small. Her name is Christie. She likes to play. Takes a break only when you wither away.
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A.K. Kuykendall (The Possession (The Writer's Block trilogy, #1))
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Tragedy occurred outside normal time, everyday convention. It possessed a bewildering ability to fade and grow brighter simultaneously.
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David Hewson (The House of Dolls (Pieter Vos, #1))
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it’s clear he’s never used one of these before, and it sends something incredibly possessive through me. Of being the first person he tries it with, showing him how to put it in and make himself feel good. Fuck, it’s powerful. Too powerful.
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Bree Wiley (Pretty Broken Doll)
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Birdie's two front teeth were gapped, which gave him a strange stirring in his heart. But she was no more claimable then for sappy loving sentiment than she ever would be, and would always deflect his attempts to moon...She had a face, it seemed to him, that was unreal somehow, as perfectly unreal as a doll's yet with the capacity to open, become human in an instant, and suck him in unawares...she would turn her eyes to him and before he could gather his far-flung self again she had drawn him into her like some stronger, brighter heavenly body. He was possessed, almost, something essential in him trapped in her, trapped but not entirely uncomfortable. He could never quite reconcile her real presence with what her presence suggested to him, and it kept him not only enchanted but also confused in some deep sense he couldn't grasp.
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Brad Watson (The Heaven of Mercury)
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(The Buffum sisters were always ahead of their time. As a child, Elizabeth recalled listening to her older sister Sarah read a futuristic essay she had written about twentieth-century America in which “she pictured the Negroes as in possession of the government and at the head of society” and “great consternation existed at the capital because the daughter of the President of the United States had married a white man.” Some of their friends, Elizabeth added, “did not like the paper very well.”)
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Gail Collins (America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines)
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Oh dolly, crikey; oh golly gee. How many faces do you see? Is it one? Two? Three? Gee whiz, it can't be. There are many, many faces on her ravaged body.
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A.K. Kuykendall
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Many of the persons convicted at Salem were found to have dolls in their possession, a piece of circumstantial evidence that in itself was almost sufficient to convict them. But there were other ways if determining whether a person was a witch or not.
Witches were thought to have witch-marks on some part of their bodies, an area of skin that was red or blue or in some way different from the rest. Furthermore, at some time during a twenty-four-hour period, it was thought, the devil or one of his imps would visit the witch and be visible to observers. He might come in the shape of a man or a woman or a child, or a cat, dog, rat, toad--indeed, any kind of creature. The devil could take nearly any shape he chose. So the usual procedure against a person accused of witchcraft was to search his or her belongings for dolls, search his or her body for witch-marks, and then keep watch over the person in the middle of the room for twenty-four hours. God help anyone who had an old doll in his possession and in addition had some skin blemish.
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Edmund S. Morgan (American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America)
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for all its layers and complexity, home possesses a certain universality. Our nesting dolls are built from the same DNA blocks and carbon atoms. As we close our eyes and think home, I suspect that we all feel something, that our minds entertain similar questions in seeking to define it. It’s the confidence in this universality that emboldens us to ask complete strangers where they are from.
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Vanessa A. Bee (Home Bound: An Uprooted Daughter's Reflections on Belonging)
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Otho Eskin
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Man goes on living mechanically and unconsciously. Man is like a screwed up doll. Man go on repeating the same stupidity again and again. Man seems to be the only animal, who does not learn from experiences at all.
In Arabic they have a saying that even a donkey will not fall in the same ditch again. But man can fall in the same ditch hundreds
of times. Psychologists define neurosis as repeating the same behaviour over and over again and expecting a different result. This is certainly the most important observation about man: that he never learns from his experience. He goes on in a vicious circle. He functions like a machine.
To become a mediator all that is needed is to learn from your experience. Don't repeat the same stupid behavior. Don't repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Don't repeat the same anger, greed, jealousy, negativity and possessiveness. You have repeated them enough and you have burned your hands enough.
It is time to become aware, to be watchful and to be alert. It is time not to fall into the same traps again and again. As you become capable of awareness and watchfulness, you become more and more capable of being free of all those old traps. A moment comes when one is absolutely free from all traps and imprisonments.
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Swami Dhyan Giten (The Way of the Heart)
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The walls are lined with Bankers Boxes and plastic bins. These boxes contain things like rag dolls with missing eyes and tablecloths permanently marred with mustard stains because my mother does not believe in throwing anything away. In her opinion, failures of foresight are the worst kind.
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Laura van den Berg (State of Paradise)