“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?- Howl”

“She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily. I'd know her head anywhere.And what's inside it. I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy?”

“A howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. -”

“Pie in a bed of raw onions. Human skull looking put-upon. -- Howl”

“What's this?' she asked. 'Is it a sphinx?'Yes,' he answered, 'and the sphinx is you.”

“He picked up the skull and knocked an onion ring out of its eye socket. "I see Sophie has been busy again. Couldn't you have restrained her, my friend?" The skull yattered its teeth at him. Howl put it down rather hastily.”