Dolls fire our collective imagination, for better and - too often - for worse. From life-size dolls the same height as the little girls who carry them, to dolls whose long hair can 'grow' longer, to Barbie and her fashionable sisters, dolls do double duty as child's play and the focus of adult art and adult fear.
Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky?
Was there a father?
Or have the planets cut holes in their nets
and let our childhood out,
or are we the dolls themselves,
born but never fed?
I had many dolls. And you know how I played with them? By performing insurrections, assemblies, scenes of arrest. My dolls were almost never babies to be nursed but men and women who attacked barracks and ended up in prison.
A child playing with dolls may shed heartfelt tears when his bundle of rags and scraps becomes deathly ill and dies ... So we may come to an understanding of language as playing with dolls: in language, scraps of sound are used to make dolls and replace all the things in the world.
My regular life today is reading books, making dolls houses, sewing dolls with my daughter and barbequing.
All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
I am a collector of dolls and doll parts. I'm rarely creeped out by most dolls, either in real life or in literature, but I know many people who are.
When I first came up in the wrestling business, there was a movie called 'The California Dolls' about a female tag team - girls who are struggling trying to make it in the wrestling world. I started out in a tag team, and my name was Britani Knight, and my dad named us after The California Dolls. We were called The Norfolk Dolls.
I used to love playing paper dolls with my mother - she would cut them out and I would dress the dolls.
Through their play Barbara imagined their lives as adults. They used the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people.
There used to be Engelbert dolls with sideburns. Now they sell Elvis dolls with the sideburns, but I don't begrudge him that.
I was performing with the Pussycat Dolls when I was approached by a company who wanted to do a workout series. I hired the creator of the Dolls, and as a team we went in and rehearsed and put together this series.
I played with dolls until I was 15. My mother encouraged it because my older sister got married when she was 15, so Mom thought that the longer I stayed with dolls, the better.
Little girls love dolls. They just don't love dolls clothes
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice.
With two older brothers, I was a tomboy in one sense, but on the other hand I really loved dolls. My brothers weren't very happy when I nicked their Action Men to play with my dolls and they were appalled when I made them kiss my Barbies.