Quotes About Unspeakable

I used writing to take language where women's pain was--and women's fear--and I kept excavating for the words that could bear the burden of speaking the unspeakable...

The "Genuine 'real life,'" as Dostoevsky called it, is an obsession, a torment for the writer. With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.

Ah, the loneliness, the unspeakable loneliness, how it presses on the heart.

The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.

I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.

He had been petrified by what he saw there in Germany. He must have been deeply haunted by his father's role in it. Unspeakably frightened. It had unmoored him.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

There are some things which no novelist, no historian, should attempt; some few scenes in life's drama which even no poet should dare to paint.

It is not easy to express the inexpressible

It is a longing so intense that it creates what it desires, it cannot endure any touch of correction; it is, as I say, unspeakable.

Dark, horror of darkness my darkness, drowning, swirling around me crashing wave on wave—unspeakable, irresistible headwind, fatal harbor!

What seems to be unspeakable weakness can sometimes be just distaste for the generally accepted morality.

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at is worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the noblest work of God.

unspeakable.

There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.

Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.

In this unprecedented moment in American history, there is no more time for tinkering around the edges. It is time to reject "conventional wisdom" and "incrementalism." It is time to fundamentally rethink our adherence to the system of unfettered capitalism, and to address the unspeakable harm that system is doing to us all.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

Him Who is not to be Named.

The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.

The second anniversary opened an internal crack in Sonia, a fissure through which she released the explosive feeling that had horrified her for two years. The conflagration that had burned so many, that had pushed people into the open air, onto the ledges from which they jumped, some of them on fire, had left its unspeakable images inside my niece. ...Sonia didn't want a world in which buildings fell down and wars were fought for no reason.

Miss Frost put her fingers to her forehead. Do explain, Maddy. You're making it sound as if you've fallen into some unspeakable sin. You might say so, Miss Barton said. I wrote a book.

We've seen some insane signs: 'Is that a loaf of bread in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?' Funny stuff along those lines. Very original. One just said, 'I will do unspeakable things.' I thought that was very interesting - and mildly terrifying!

I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.