Skull Island Quotes

Siren Song This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see beached skulls the song nobody knows because anyone who had heard it is dead, and the others can’t remember. Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit? I don’t enjoy it here squatting on this island looking picturesque and mythical with these two feathery maniacs, I don’t enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable. I will tell the secret to you, to you, only to you. Come closer. This song is a cry for help: Help me! Only you, only you can, you are unique at last. Alas it is a boring song but it works every time.

It rained; then it snowed, and the snow stayed on the paved ground for long enough to become evenly blacked with soot and smoke-fall, evenly but for islands of yellow left by uptown dogs. Then it rained again, and the whole creation was transformed into cold slop, which made walking adventuresome. Then it froze; and every corner presented opportunity for entertainment, the vastly amusing spectacle of well-dressed people suspended in the indecorous positions which precede skull fractures.

But every stroke of the brush, every lyric, every word whispered between human beings resulted from the pain of being alone. In our haunted heads, our imperfect bodies. Islands carved from clay and bone, our skulls like shells full of mist.

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard.

The cat knows all. The cat knows all. When are you going to get that through your thick skull, Stowe?

And I would,” Dorian said, leaning forward before Aelin could snarl at the ignored letter. “We win this war, and you have the two largest kingdoms on this continent proclaiming you the undisputed King of all Pirates. Skull’s Bay and the Dead Islands become not a hideout for your people, but a proper home. A new kingdom.” Rolfe let out a low laugh. “The talk of young idealists and dreamers.” “The world,” Aelin said, “will be saved and remade by the dreamers, Rolfe.

SILENT, SHE WAITS FOR the sky to fall, standing upon an island of volcanic rock amidst a black sea. The long moonless night yawns before her. The only sounds, a flapping banner of war held in her lover’s hand and the warm waves that kiss her steel boots. Her heart is heavy. Her spirit wild. Peerless knights tower behind her. Salt spray beads on their family crests—emerald centaurs, screaming eagles, gold sphinxes, and the crowned skull of her father’s grim house. Her Golden eyes look to the heavens. Waiting. The water heaves in. Out. The heartbeat of her silence.

– Jag tror att du skulle kunna prata tie timmar i ett sträck om du bara vågade. Om du inte var så rädd för att komma igång. Reine välte åt sidan och blev liggande bredvid Nora i fosterställning. – Vad är du rädd för? – Att jag inte ska vara jag längre om jag börjar snacka för mycket. Om det som är viktigt.

A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

I looked at the huge charlatan with respect. Nicotine, dope, hash, barbiturates, speed, acid, smack, Colombian marching powder, ecstasy, alcohol in every form, all had entered the massive frame by some route and in quantities guaranteed to lay waste to the collected brains of three Melbourne universities or eight in Queensland. In theory, a scan of this man’s skull should reveal a place as grey and still as Kerguelen Island in winter. Yet from time to time there were clear signs of electrical activity.

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun. Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bay and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea against this sheer and limelit granite head. Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air. Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff and then were silent, waiting for the flies. Here is the symbol, and climbing dark a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells sound for the mariners. Now must we measure our days by nights, our tropics by their poles, love by its end and all our speech by silence. See in the gulfs, how small the light of home. Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers, and the black dust our crops ate was their dust? O all men are one man at last. We should have known the night that tidied up the cliffs and hid them had the same question on its tongue for us. And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange. Never from earth again the coolamon or thin black children dancing like the shadows of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh scarp of the tableland and cools its granite. Night floods us suddenly as history that has sunk many islands in its good time.

The archaeologist attached to the Bayard Dominick’s Marquesan team had reported in 1925 that the Marquesas offered “few opportunities for archaeological research.” But in 1956, a new expedition set out to reexamine the possibilities in these islands at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle. An energetic Columbia University graduate student named Robert Suggs was sent ahead to reconnoiter, and he quickly discovered that the previous generation had gotten it all wrong. Everywhere he looked, he saw archaeological potential. “We were seldom out of sight of some relic of the ancient Marquesan culture,” he writes. “Through all the valleys were scattered clusters of ruined house platforms. . . . Overgrown with weeds, half tumbled down beneath the weight of toppled trees and the pressure of the inexorable palm roots, these ancient village sites were sources of stone axes, carved stone pestles, skulls, and other sundry curios.” There were ceremonial plazas “hundreds of feet long” and, high on the cliffs above the deep valleys, “burial caves containing the remains of the population of centuries past.” The coup de grâce came when Suggs and his guide followed up on a report of a large number of “pig bones” in the dunes at a place called Ha‘atuatua. This windswept expanse of scrub and sand lies on the exposed eastern corner of Nuku Hiva. A decade earlier, in 1946, a tidal wave had cut away part of the beach, and since then bones and other artifacts had been washing out of the dunes. Not knowing quite what to expect, Suggs and his guide rode over on horseback. When they came out of the “hibiscus tangle” at the back of the beach and “caught sight of the debris washing down the slope,” he writes, “I nearly fell out of the saddle.” The bones that were scattered all along the slope and on the beach below were not pig bones but human bones! Ribs, vertebrae, thigh bones, bits of skull vault, and innumerable hand and foot bones were everywhere. At the edge of the bank a bleached female skull rested upside down, almost entirely exposed. Where the bank had been cut away, a dark horizontal band about two feet thick could be seen between layers of clean white sand. Embedded in this band were bits of charcoal and saucers of ash, fragments of pearl shell, stone and coral tools, and large fitted stones that appeared to be part of a buried pavement. They had discovered the remains of an entire village, complete with postholes, cooking pits, courtyards, and burials. The time was too short to explore the site fully, but the very next year, Suggs and his wife returned to examine it. There

Soon after three o'clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland's skull. During the few seconds before his crash he clutched at the whiplashing spokes of the steering wheel, dazed by the impact of the chromium window pillar against his head. The car veered from side to side across the empty traffic lanes, jerking his hands like a puppet's. The shredding tyre laid a black diagonal stroke across the white marker lines that followed the long curve of the motorway embankment. Out of control, the car burst through the palisade of pinewood trestles that formed a temporary barrier along the edge of the road. Leaving the hard shoulder, the car plunged down the grass slope of the embankment. Thirty yards ahead, it came to a halt against the rusting chassis of an overturned taxi. Barely injured by this violent tangent that had grazed his life, Robert Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights.

When you hold a skull in your hands, can you tell if it's Christian or Muslim?

She picked a raspberry, stared at it a moment, and then popped it into her mouth. For an instant, it felt smooth and tasteless, and then she squashed it. Sharp sweetness exploded gloriously over her tongue. It was so overwhelmingly raspberry that it felt as if it invaded her skull and displaced every thought--- there was only flavor. Powerful, intoxicating flavor. She'd forgotten what a freshly picked berry tasted like. On Alyssium, the fruit was imported. There wasn't space on the city island for gardens or orchards or berry patches. The emperor had had his greenhouses, filled with delicacies, but a librarian... She hadn't tasted a just-ripened raspberry since her childhood. It tasted like a bite of sunshine. Caz poked her ankle. "Are you poisoned?" "I'm in ecstasy," she corrected. "Huh," Caz said. "You really think this will work?" Kiela opened her eyes and again surveyed the wealth of berries before her, a glorious chaos of ruby-red riches, enough to create many jars of jam. "I think it's perfect.

Beck sucked in his breath guiltily and held it. After a long moment, she smiled, amused, and gestured with her head for him to ride beside her. He let out his breath slowly, wondering where this sudden admiration of his friend’s physical appearance was coming from. As he considered the uncertainty of these new and stirring feelings, he was without a doubt very certain about one thing. If Kiernan knew, she would bash his skull in.

Marriage is full of such cut-and-dry arrangements, Rhonda thought,then felt that small ache she sometimes got at the back of her skull-the one that told her she might be alone forever, not a fate that she chose but rather a fate that seemed to have been chosen for her.

A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn’t taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindleshaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

Ah yes, the skulls that once sang and danced, told stories, stored memories and did a thousand foolish and wonderful things before they became artifacts, empty seashells that fell to the bottom of the sea. So many of his friends who lived through this time are dead; so many of those who remain don’t have many years left. Each remembers fragments. Sometimes, on one of those islands of memory, he finds an old house. There is a picture of a person in it, left tacked on a wall or buried in a pile of leaves and old boards. Who were they? He remembers a few things. He rummages through his memory as though it were one of the jumbled boxes in the Vasquez Island Free Store. Sometimes he finds a shirt that he remembers someone having worn. He holds it up in the darkness of the store and says out loud,  “if you see yourself in this book, fear not, it is not really you, it’s just one of my characters dressed up in some of the old clothes you threw away.

In December of 2007 human bones including skulls, which have been radiocarbon dated back to between 1304 and 1424, were found in a museum in Concepción, Chile. These skulls were originally discovered on Isla Mocha, which is located 25 miles off the south-central coast of Chile. Since some of them have definite telltale signs of being Polynesian, the strong suggestion is that there was a pre-Columbian interaction between the local Mapuche people and the Polynesian seafarers. This contact is further supported by forensic evidence found near the Chilean site of “El Arenal,” which is a sandy dune approximately 3 miles inland from the coast. Pottery found in Ecuador, predating the arrival of Columbus in America, have markings similar to pottery found on the southernmost island of Kyushu, Japan. Radiocarbon dating has determined the date of organics in the clay that survived the firing, or from food or liquids stored in the pottery, to be 4500 years old with a possible variance of 200 to 500 years, thus predating Columbus by a wide margin. There is no reason to doubt these findings, which indicate that Asians and Polynesians sailed to all parts of the Pacific Ocean, including the vast continents of North and South America that border it on its far eastern side. It was always assumed that Spaniards introduced Chickens to the new continent; however the chicken bones found at the site also dated back to this era, proving that it was the Polynesians that first brought this edible bird with them! The proof is conclusive…. America was discovered prior to Columbus!

Distance reminds us that there’s a lot more to the universe than just people—that there’s even a lot more to people than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and distance in space—it’s the first and fundamental religious experience.

The chamber was a cool, chill black- as if we'd stepped inside the mind of some sleeping beast. And within its round space gleamed glittering islands of light. Of jewels. Ten thousand years' worth of treasure. It was neatly organised, in podiums and open drawers and busts and racks. 'The family jewels,' Rhys said with a devious grin. ... ...carved into the rock was an entire wall of crowns. They each had their own resting place, lined with black velvet, each illuminated by- 'Glowworms,' Rhys told me as the tiny, bluish globs crusted in the arches of each nook seemed to glitter like the entire night sky. In fact... What I'd taken for small faelights in the ceiling high above... It was all glowworms. Pale blue and turquoise, their light as silken as moonlight, illumining the jewels with ancient, silent fire. 'Pick one,' Rhys whispered in my ear. 'A glowworm?' He nipped at my earlobe. 'Smartass.' He steered me back toward the wall of crowns, each wholly different- as individual as skulls. 'Pick whichever crown you like.' 'I can't just- take one.' 'You must certainly can. They belong to you.

In a crowded cave, one grenade might do the work of twenty bullets. Sword-wielding officers beheaded dozens of willing victims. There were reports of children forming into a circle and tossing a live hand grenade, one to another, until it exploded and killed them all. In a cave filled with Japanese soldiers and civilians, Yamauchi recalled, a sergeant ordered mothers to keep their infants quiet, and when they were unable to do so, he told them, “Kill them yourself or I’ll order my men to do it.” Several mothers obeyed.94 As the Japanese perimeter receded toward the island’s northern terminus at Marpi Point, civilians who had thus far resisted the suicide order were forced back to the edge of a cliff that dropped several hundred feet onto a rocky shore. In a harrowing finale, many thousands of Japanese men, women, and children took that fateful last step. The self-destructive paroxysm could not be explained by deference to orders, or by obeisance to the death cult of imperial bushido. Suicide, the Japanese of Saipan earnestly believed, was the sole alternative to a fate worse than death. The Americans were not human beings—they were something akin to demons or beasts. They were the “hairy ones,” or the “Anglo-American Demons.” They would rape the women and girls. They would crush captured civilians under the treads of their tanks. The marines were especially dreaded. According to a story circulated widely among the Japanese of Saipan, all Marine Corps recruits were compelled to murder their own parents before being inducted into service. It was said that Japanese soldiers taken prisoner would suffer hideous tortures—their ears, noses, and limbs would be cut off; they would be blinded and castrated; they would be cooked and fed to dogs. Truths and half-truths were shrewdly wedded to the more outrageous and far-fetched claims. Japanese newspapers reproduced photographs of Japanese skulls mounted on American tanks. A cartoon appearing in an American servicemen’s magazine, later reproduced and translated in the Japanese press, had suggested that marine enlistees would receive a “Japanese hunting license,” promising “open season” on the enemy, complete with “free ammunition and equipment—with pay!”95 Other cartoons, also reproduced in Japan, characterized the Japanese as monkeys, rats, cockroaches, or lice. John Dower’s study War Without Mercy explored the means by which both American and Japanese propaganda tended to dehumanize the enemy. Among the Japanese, who could not read or hear any dissenting views, the excesses of American wartime rhetoric and imagery lent credibility to the implication that a quick suicide was the path of least suffering. Saipan was the first Pacific battlefield in which Americans had encountered a large civilian population. No one had known what to expect. Would women and children take up weapons and hurl themselves at the Americans?

Distance reminds us that there's a lot more to the universe than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there.

I’m gonna move like Mrs. James for the rest of my life,” Banks continued. “Calm. Because all that other shit don’t be working. Not for me anyway.

We were imbued with the sound of the wind that blew in from the seashore, beating in our ears every morning, clearing our brains and rinsing the dust from our skulls.

Thunder, lightning, rain, hail, anxious fog and all the other things that accompany an iconic horror movie or damn fire tale about Tea, Cake, and lashings of Untimely Death, were occurring all over the little island known colloquially (and everywhere else) as The Skull.

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. It was madness and desperation and deprivation and torment gone supernova, screeches and howls and, sprinkled in here and there, my own name.

Wine flowed from fountains, down into the mouths of those who lay in the pools beneath them. Narcotic fumes oozed from cubes of incense that smouldered in human skulls. I saw men and women of incredible beauty, like glaciers or naked flames. All were dancing, dancing.

I’m sorry, but I can’t trust your instincts. The cost is too heavy.

You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what’s always been going on, whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time.

In their own sweepstake fashion, hippopotamuses will reach Malta, Sicily and Crete over the water, and become dwarfed to tiny forms. In many islands, dwarf elephants will roam. With a single, large nasal opening to support the trunk, and eye sockets not entirely surrounded by bone, their skulls will provide a mystery to early civilizations, who will imagine giant, one-eyed cyclops living in the caves of the Mediterranean.