Vertebra Quotes

1. "...every vertebrae on his back was a prayer bead under my hands."
Author: Amy Lane

2. "There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth."
Author: Anthony Burgess

3. "Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?"
Author: Anthony Doerr

4. "With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species."
Author: Anthony Storr

5. "Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen. No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.' Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother."
Author: Augusten Burroughs

6. "Excellent posture is the most important personality trait in an effective salesman. It allows him to pass for a vertebrate."
Author: Bauvard

7. "Other anatomical changes associated with long-duration space flight are definitely negative: the immune system weakens, the heart shrinks because it doesn't have to strain against gravity, eyesight tends to degrade, sometimes markedly (no one's exactly sure why yet). The spine lengthens as the little sacs of fluid between the vertebrae expand, and bone mass decreases as the body sheds calcium. Without gravity, we don't need muscle and bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also so inherently bad for the human body, long-term."
Author: Chris Hadfield

8. "¿Estás segura?—Absolutamalditamente.Confirmado. Estaba como un cencerro.Se volvió en redondo, enfadado, con ese gruñido gutural que solía provocarme un placentero estremecimiento a lo largo de la columna vertebral.—Eres la persona más tozuda…—¡¿Yo?! —exclamé, incrédula—. Que ¿yo soy tozuda?Ya lo creo. Lo mejor era encerrarme y tirar la llave.De pronto, se plantó delante de mí.—Como una mula.—¿Porque no quiero que te suicides? ¿Por eso soy tozuda?Bajó la cabeza hasta detenerla a escasos centímetros de la mía, aunque no le veía el rostro.—Absolutamalditamente.¡Plagiador! Apreté los dientes."
Author: Darynda Jones

9. "Caxton crawled into the back while Arkeley took the front passenger seat. His fused vertebrae trumped her sprained ribs, he announced."
Author: David Wellington

10. "She thought him invertebrate and conventional."
Author: E.M. Forster

11. "Solo For Ear-Trumpet The carriage brushes through the brightLeaves (violent jets from life to light);Strong polished speed is plunging, heavesBetween the showers of bright hot leavesThe window-glasses glaze our facesAnd jar them to the very basis — But they could never put a polishUpon my manners or abolishMy most distinct disinclinationFor calling on a rich relation!In her house — (bulwark built betweenThe life man lives and visions seen) — The sunlight hiccups white as chalk,Grown drunk with emptiness of talk,And silence hisses like a snake — Invertebrate and rattling ache….Then suddenly EternityDrowns all the houses like a seaAnd down the street the Trump of DoomBlares madly — shakes the drawing-roomWhere raw-edged shadows sting forlornAs dank dark nettles. Down the hornOf her ear-trumpet I conveyThe news that 'It is Judgment Day!''Speak louder: I don't catch, my dear.'I roared: 'It is the Trump we hear!''The What?' 'THE TRUMP!' 'I shall complain!…. the boy-scouts practising again."
Author: Edith Sitwell

12. "A pat on the back is only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, but is miles ahead in results."
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

13. "Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat."
Author: George C. Williams

14. "Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra."
Author: Herman Melville

15. "Where once was a vertebrae is now a tangle, from constant kissing at an awkward angle."
Author: James Cagney

16. "Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

17. "Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time."
Author: Joseph O'Neill

18. "What they discovered was that not only fish, but spiders and many insects can taste their food by the structures that are most likely to first come in contact with the food. And this in many invertebrate species turns out to be the feet."
Author: Karen Shanor

19. "This is a trial about watermelons! Watermelons are invertebrate creatures!' cried Quall."
Author: Kristin Cashore

20. "Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken"
Author: M.T. Anderson

21. "But my back hurt like hell. I never realized how much pain three cracked vertebrae could inflict on a guy. Of course, I never realized I had three cracked vertebrae either. I could move my right shoulder despite a torn rotator cuff, which I also didn't realize I had. And my broken nose throbbed a bit, which was kid's stuff compared with the rest. I knew one side of my face was shredded by the fall down the mountain, and the big cut on my forehead was pretty sore."
Author: Marcus Luttrell

22. "I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to runoff with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescentwasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfareto be that rivalry which occurs between apes."
Author: Marisha Pessl

23. "We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate."
Author: Murray Bookchin

24. "If leadership is the spinal cord of success then discipline is its lumbar vertebrae."
Author: Noel DeJesus

25. "In a perfect patch of paradise he stays immobile for an eternity while the predawn breath strokes his skin and kisses each vertebrae down his spine."
Author: Poppet

26. "Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.It is true that they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely."
Author: Richard Hughes

27. "[...] experimentaram o que era estar num purgatório, uma longa espera inerme, uma espera cuja coluna vertebral era o desamparo, coisa muito latino-americana, aliás, uma sensação familiar, uma coisa que se você pensasse bem experimentava todos os dias, mas sem angústia, sem a sombra da morte sobrevoando o bairro como um bando de urubus e espessando tudo, subvertendo a rotina de tudo, pondo todas as coisas de pernas para o ar."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

28. "[Jack] checked his watch, then returned to studying her back. damn if she didn't have a nice back, too - smooth, unblemished skin, nicely shaped vertebrae-He pulled himself up short. Nicely shaped vertebrae? Was he going insane?"
Author: Sarah Mayberry

29. "Tradition, thought Merkin, was not the most reliable thing in the world. Tradition had this nasty habit of asserting itself overnight. A new species of funny-shaped, bioluminescent invertebrate found sixteen thousand feet under the ocean might instantly become part of the Chinese traditional medicine, for instance. You never knew."
Author: Sorin Suciu

30. "Every vertebra, every knuckle, both kneecaps, both hips. I am a pile of bones on the floor and no one knows it but me. I am a broken skeleton with a beating heart."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

31. "...in better company, they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrezarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust."
Author: Victor Hugo

32. "Her eyes were misting over, her heart was talking on her lips. To need everything when everything is finished. She no longer knew whether she was sad or whether it was hunger. To live like that, head bent forward, chin resting down near her breasts, without muscles, without sinews, without vertebrae.She smiled a martyr's smile for her own benefit: for her wretchedness was also a tenderness, and resignation is not the same as oblivion."
Author: Violette Leduc

33. "Our children think our world will end. It's a tragic thing. Adults don't think that. They don't see that we are eating the planet. But we are. If you take all the biomass of vertebrates on the planet, 98% are men and their domestic animals. All the wild animals in the world make up only 2%."
Author: Yann Arthus Bertrand

34. "Another time I cracked two of the vertebrae in my back and broke a rib."
Author: Zakk Wylde

Vertebra Quotes Pictures