Puppet Passage of the Day...

[G. S. Carnivals]

Quote ( View Quotes )
Here and there scraps of debris hop about with no wind to guide them. These are the only things that seem to move in these streets, though there is a constant scraping noise that follows one's steps. If one pauses for a moment to look into a narrow space between buildings, something may be seen dragging itself along the ground, or perhaps it has already laid itself across the street, obstructing the way that leads out of the city. This figure is only that of a dead-eyed dummy; yet, when someone tries to step over the thing, its mouth suddenly drops open. At the time this is the best the city can do - a sham of menace that has no life and deceives no one.       Thomas Ligotti - “New Faces in the City” Added by: G. S. Carnivals on 06-17-2008 #272

[Dr. Bantham]

This could, of course, be considered cheating. However, let it be known that I am not always one to take the hard way out . . .
Quotation Database Search - "puppet"

[Bleak&Icy]

Something of the darkness and restlessness of the sea had penetrated my heart, so that I lived in an unreasoning, unperceiving torment; a torment none the less acute because of the subtlety of its origin and the strange, unmotivated quality of its vampiric existence. Before my eyes lay the phantasmagoria of the purpling clouds, the strange silver bauble, the recurrent stagnant foam, the loneliness of that bleak-eyed house, and the mockery of the puppet town. I no longer went to the village, for it seemed only a travesty of life. Like my own soul, it stood upon a dark enveloping sea--a sea grown slowly hateful to me. And among these images, corrupt and festering, dwelt that of an object whose human contours left ever smaller the doubt of what it once had been.

"The Night Ocean"
by H. P. Lovecraft & R. H. Barlow
Written 1936

(With a nod to Slawek)

[Bleak&Icy]

The body is the stuttering puppet of the mind, beginning as automatic and becoming autonomous. A transference— the puppet becomes the showman.

-- The Logomachy of Zos By Austin Osman Spare

[Bleak&Icy]

Look at your body—
A painted puppet, a poor toy
Of jointed parts ready to collapse,
A diseased and suffering thing
With a head full of false imaginings.

—The Dhammapada

Quoted by TL as an epigraph to THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE (pdf version)

[Bleak&Icy]

I had the sensation of being in two worlds at once. In the first place, the ordinary world of things and people had entirely changed, and it was ridiculous even to think of it; so imaginary, artificial and unreal did it appear now. Everything that belonged to this world had become remote, foreign and unintelligible to me— and I myself most of all, this very I that had arrived two hours before with all sorts of luggage and had hurried off to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight. All this—and the whole of the life of which it formed a part— seemed a puppet-show, which moreover was most clumsily put together and crudely painted, thus not resembling any reality whatsoever. Quite as grotesquely senseless and tragically ineffective appeared all my previous thoughts about the Taj Mahal and its riddle.

-- A New Model of the Universe by P. D. Ouspensky

[Bleak&Icy]

First of all we need to understand that we are machine-people, simple puppets controlled by secret agents, hidden Selves.

We have all sorts of people within each of us, all kinds of Selves. Our personality is only a marionette, a talking puppet, something mechanical.

“Mythomaniacs” abound everywhere, those who believe that they are Gods; mechanical and ordinary creatures, people from the mud of the earth, wretched puppets moved by diverse Selves. These kind of people will not work upon themselves...

--A Treatise on Revolutionary Psychology by Samuel Aun Weor

[Bleak&Icy]

Only after it had appeared would it begin to make any sound, clattering as it moved directly in front of my eyes, and then, as always happened, I would be looking at a creature that I might say had all the appearances of an antiquated marionette, a puppet figure of some archaic type.

It was almost life-sized and hovered just far enough above the floor of the medicine shop that its face was at the same level as my own. I am describing the puppet creature as it appeared during the medicine-shop visit, but it always took the form of the same antiquated marionette hovering before me in a reddish-gold haze. Its design was that of a clown puppet in pale pantaloons over-draped by a kind of pale smock, thin and pale hands emerging from the ruffled cuffs of its sleeves, and a powder-pale head rising above a ruffled collar. I always found it difficult at first to look directly at the face of the puppet creature whenever it appeared, because the expression which had been created for that face was so simple and bland, yet at the same time so intensely evil and perverse. In the observation of at least one commentator on puppet theater, the expressiveness of a puppet or marionette resides in its arms, hands, and legs, never in its face or head, as is the case with a human actor. But in the case of the puppet thing hovering before me in the medicine shop, this was not true. Its expressiveness was all in that face with its pale and pitted expression, its slightly pointed nose and delicate lips, and its dead puppet eyes--eyes that did not seem able to fix or focus themselves upon anything but only gazed with an unchanging expression of dreamy malignance, an utterly nonsensical expression of stupefied viciousness, dumbfounded cruelty.

-- "The Clown Puppet" by Thomas Ligotti

[G. S. Carnivals]

"The people by me primitively guess that I am enemy and hate me: not alone for being different, or disdaining work, or worse, not doing any; but for something that would seem, if spoken for them, words of magic; for I take their souls away - I know it - and I play with them; I puppet them up to something; I march them through strange crowds and passions; I snuffle at their roots."

William H. Gass - "Mrs. Mean"

[yellowish haze]

-- The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, Simon Karlinsky

There you go: today's puppet passage from a boastful Pole.

(btw, this comes from google books. I didn't feel like transcribing the whole page so I thought about the print screen option;))