Dolls Quotes

“Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions.”
― Stephen King, Desperation

“It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years”
― Tim Cummings, Orphans

“I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.”
― Tim Cummings, Orphans

“Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.

-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")”
― Tim Cummings

“My sisters treated me like a living doll for years, carrying me around so much that I didn’t bother learning to walk until I was almost two.”
― Karen M. McManus, One of Us Is Next

“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

“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

“Violet, this closet with all the creepy dolls, can I—” “Don’t touch my creepy doll collection, Leiza,” Violet says sharply. “Quit trying to get rid of all my favorite things.”
― Kristy Cunning, Gypsy Moon

“This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. ...But we have a difficult situation here so I guess we'll be looking at putting different sound chips in the dolls heading there [Britain].”
― Todd McFarlane

“Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me.
It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see.”
― Kate Bernheimer, The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

“Patches don’t look it, but when attached to your soul they can get pretty heavy. They go over the holes in your soul, like when you patch a sock. When you have a hole in your soul, it’s because you’re hurting from something. I don’t know if you noticed, but that girl had a lot of holes.”
― Nathan Reese Maher, Lights Out: Book 2

“The shadow self is what lies beneath the makeup. It’s those ugly parts that you haven’t accepted about yourself. You hide those parts in the shadows until you’re ready.” Her face remained a haunting calm. “When you realize the scars are who you are, that there was nothing wrong with you and that you were beautiful all along - that’s when you decide to take the makeup off.”
― Nathan Reese Maher, Lights Out: Book 2

“It is strange and cold. I can feel it through the box" said Miss Flower and she cried, "No one will understand us or know what we want. Oh no one will understand us again!"
But Miss Happiness was more hopeful and more brave. "I think they will,"she said.
"How will they?"
"Because there will be some little girl who is clever and kind."
"Will there be?" said Miss Flower longingly.
"Yes."
"Why will there be?"
"Because there always has been," said Miss Happiness.”
― Rumer Godden, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower

“So Big Bear dined with the Princess,
"Did you see him? You'd never have guessed!"
His party hat was like her crown,
and they talked until the sun went down.
From the winter poem, The Fairytale Princess”
― Suzy Davies, Celebrate The Seasons

“There’s nothing wrong with you at all. Sometimes people say or do things that are mean because there's something the matter with them. With Lydia, it seems there’s always something wrong with her.”
― Nathan Reese Maher, Lights Out: Book 2

“Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except somebody to play with. She was very lonely!”
― Dare Wright, The Lonely Doll

“Children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

“Because I am, just as you are you. We don’t always get to pick who we are, Shelly Wynn, but we can choose to celebrate it.”
― Nathan Reese Maher, Lights Out: Book 2

“Failures are just the rest stops on your highway to Success.”
― Gayle Wray

“One of the greatest tragedies of the world is the way it has wasted so much female potential. Half the world has been sold the idea that they should sit in the corner playing with dolls and staring in a mirror. It’s time for women to regain the status they had in pagan cultures based on the worship of the Goddess. Women are half of the equation for creating a new humanity. This time we need to get the right answer. Men and women are different. That’s not a problem: it powers the dialectic that drives us forward. The aim is to get the best of both worlds and achieve higher and higher syntheses. It’s outrageous that women have been forced to live in a male-dominated culture. In the future, it needs to be an equal partnership. Not a partnership that mindlessly treats women and men as equals when there are plainly radical differences between the two, but which assigns equal significance to their respective strengths. Yin and yang are eternal partners, not eternal enemies. Neither is more important than the other. Neither can function without the other. The dialectic needs both working at full power.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Sex for Salvation

“Don't bother pulling my string again-
Not behind those doll eyes anymore
I won't say what's expected, kid,
laugh at your tantrum on the floor

I'm just not looking at you, kid,
I'm not a piss-poor heart anymore;
Not going home with the lowest bid
Out of stock- your projection whore

I'm never going back to the toy box
Elevated up from the cellar-
home of the wish-washed pretty cocks
Out of the dark, preachin' Helen Keller

Bored with the coin-operated allure
I'm top shelf, kid, out of your reach
You can't afford to walk in the store
Turn around, kid, don't slip in bleach


-from 'Ragdoll$ & Riche$”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Confessions of a D3AD Petal

“Some months later, the Van Tassel children invited classmates home to play with their new doll. This was in the dead of winter. When the guests arrived, they did indeed find the Van Tassel children sliding down hill with a new doll. But that new doll was a human baby, the youngest Van Tassel, dead and frozen stiff. The baby had died the previous week, and had been stored in the woodshed for burial when the frost was out of the ground; the other children had asked if diey might have Susan for a doll, and Mrs. Van Tassel had not demurred.”
― Russell Kirk, Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales

“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.”
― A.K. Kuykendall, The Possession

“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.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“A black-veiled nun, holding plastic bags full of cucumbers, apricots, and onions in one hand and pressing two tall blonde Barbie dolls wrapped in plastic to her breast with the other, stopped before the tomato vendor, whose vegetable knife hung from a lanyard around his neck, laid the dolls on a wooden crate, and asked for a few kilos of tomatoes on the vine.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“And they are lovely, the turbines, better than power lines, particularly when the sky is blue. Sometimes I do stare at them. The blades look like ballerina’s legs, but all calves and no feet, like ballerina’s legs but with the feet chopped off at the ankle, like a German fairy tale.”
― Susan Neville, The Town of Whispering Dolls: Stories

“...dolls have a kind of immortality not granted to humans.”
― Johana Gast Anderton, Twentieth Century Dolls

“I renovated my brain's math knowledge lobe. It is now an emporium of artistic wonders.”
― Gayle Wray, Making Angelina

“Whenever a new doll arrived from Dolls of All Nations, she'd hit the porch with wires around her wrists, ankles, and neck. I must have freed more than twenty, their eyes opening slowly once they got back on their feet.”
― Angela Chaidez Vincent, Arena Glow

“He imagines dancing with her, the two of them arm in arm under the stars. Silent, of course, but that is no matter. It is better that way. She is a dancing doll, his Coppélia, created at last.”
― Lucy Ashe, The Dance of the Dolls