Inarticulate Quotes - Page 2

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

Alain de Botton

Always Trying, Anxiety, Form

Twitter post from Apr 22, 2013

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just as violence is the last refuge of the inarticulate, so it is also the first resort of the incompetent, the easy out for the man who is capable of expressing himself only in the most primitive and vulgar of dramatic terms. He leaves us with only the obscenity of violence per se - and the pornographer thereof will always be with us, in film as in any other medium. And so will his audience.

Judith Crist

Men, Lasts, Violence

Judith Crist (1968). “The private eye, the cowboy, and the very naked girl: movies from Cleo to Clyde”

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The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential “you” which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your “feeling.”

John Galt

Dream, Self Esteem, Thinking

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[T]he democratic principle of "one man, one vote," viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Men, Voting, Principles

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The mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the inseparable garment of romance.

Walther von der Vogelweide

Romance, Soul, Half

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My intent was not to go after Rush - I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. ... There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.

Michael Steele

Voice, Littles, Enormous

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Go out and speak for the inarticulate and the submerged.

Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook

Speak, Submerged

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It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

Ralph Fiennes

Nice, Clear Direction, Giving

Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. February 10, 2014.

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The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!

Thomas Carlyle

Music, Song, Speech

Thomas Carlyle (1846). “On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History: Six Lectures ; Reported, with Emendations and Additions”, p.74

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In the course of time I have learned to tramp about coral reefs, twenty to thirty feet under water, so unconcernedly that I can pay attention to particular definite things. But after all my silly fears have been allayed, even now, with eyes overflowing with surfeit of color, I am still almost inarticulate. We need a whole new vocabulary, new adjectives, adequately to describe the designs and colors of under sea.

William Beebe

Ocean, Silly, Eye

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I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.

Anais Nin

Love You, Joy, Piercings

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People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

William Trevor

Writing, People, Articulation

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As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.

Graham Swift

Thinking, Novelists, Levels

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Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.

John Crowley

Clever, Children, Knowing

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All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.

Thomas Carlyle

History

Thomas Carlyle (1901). “Carlyle on Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History”

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There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

Wendell Berry

Real, Inspiration, Journey

"Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms". 1982.

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What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.

Nick Laird

Selfish, Love Is, Opposites

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It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.

Kenneth Tynan

Years, Sacred, Theater

Kenneth Tynan (1964). “Tynan on theatre”

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Sometimes during solitude I hear truth spoken with clarity and freshness; uncolored and untranslated it speaks from within myself in a language original but inarticulate, heard only with the soul, and I realize I brought it with me, was never taught it nor can I efficiently teach it to another.

Hugh B. Brown

Soul, Solitude, Taught

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You're so kind, Kazuhiko. That's what I like about you." I like you, too. I love you so much." If he weren't so inarticulate, Kazuhiko could have said so much more. How much her expression, her gentle manner, her pure untainted soul meant to him. How important, in short, her existence was to him. But he wasn't able to put into words. He was only a third-year student in junior high, and worst yet, composition was one of his worst subjects.

Koushun Takami

I Like You, Love You, Expression

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Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

Boris Pasternak

Sleep, Long, Understanding

Roger Martin du Gard, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Gabriela Mistral (1971). “Roger Martin du Gard: Gabriela Mistral ; Boris Pasternak”

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As far as rapprochements go, it's awkward and vague, but the advantage of being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.

Jonathan Tropper

Awkward, Advantage, Tricks

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The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

Charles Baxter

Two, Say Anything, Problem

Charles Baxter (2009). “The Feast of Love”, p.77, Vintage

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. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

Ellen Glasgow

Love, Flower, Animal

Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1963). “Collected Stories”

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Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.

Richard Wagner

Heart, Thinking, Speech

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