Mannequins Quotes

“All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost
memories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreams
play when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“I love fake people provided they are mannequins.”
― Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel

“Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”
She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomach
in a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in the
darkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“Did Bach ever eat
pancakes at midnight?”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“History doesn’t start with a tall building
and a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is taking
us for suckers and is playing a mean game.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“She leaves my side and heads deeper into
the apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… a
copper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right
mind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.
People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what you
should name it.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“March 1898

What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul.

They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike!

They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels.

I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... and the girl in the next doorway was also masked... and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring...

I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive.

Their vitreous eyes were looking at me...

I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... so that every one of them appeared to be squinting.

Am I to be haunted by masks now?”
― Jean Lorrain, Monsieur De Phocas

“Look Samuel!” She points to the couple—I noticing a twig sticking out of her hair. “Mannequins.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“I hate fake people. You know what I’m talking about. Mannequins.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“You know, a carving, especially if it’s polychrome, is not meant to move. These faces, these half-bodies, when you animate them, they’re more live than the living. They can be dangerous for those who don’t really understand them. With contained energy, no one can predict what will happen when it’s released.”
― Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City

“But her smile is vacant. Placid. A Stepford Wife smile. The tears fall but there is nothing behind them. She’s a mannequin crying on command.”
― Tania De Rozario, Dinner on Monster Island: Essays

“Mannequins are the artificial intelligence of the modelling industry.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The weakest opponent is a mannequin.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov