Unspeakable Quotes - Page 7

• I was in the army, Terri. Special Ops, sent into the most godforsaken places you can imagine, where I did unspeakable things. We weren’t exactly sent in to teach our enemies to knit. (Nathan)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Army, Enemy, Special

  Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dianna Love (2011). “Sherrilyn Kenyon and Dianna Love - A B.A.D. Collection: Phantom in the Night, Whispered Lies, Silent Truth and an excerpt from Alterant”, p.291, Simon and Schuster

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• There is unspeakable joy... for the person who knows release from guilt and the relief of forgiveness.

  Stuart Briscoe

  Christian, Joy, Guilt

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• Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

  Emile M. Cioran

  Hate, Cities, Space

  "History and Utopia". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1960.

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• A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble broken-hearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires. Their hope is a humble hope; and their joy, even when it is unspeakable and full of glory, is a humble broken-hearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behaviour.

  Jonathan Edwards

  Christian, Children, Humble

  Jonathan Edwards (1821). “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections: In Three Parts ...”, p.293

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• The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.

  Tom Stoppard

  Life, Writing, Clothes

  "The Real Thing". Book by Tom Stoppard, November 16, 1982.

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• The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Dream, Medicine, Fields

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• Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

  Adrienne Rich

  Memories, Lying, Letters

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• I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.

  Roberto Bolano

  Summer, Dream, Sleep

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• Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

  Marie Howe

  Silence, Complicated, Complexes

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• We write to expose the unexposed. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. You can't do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can't find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder.

  Anne Lamott

  Jobs, Reading, Writing

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.198, Anchor

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• Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that result to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize. Such natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. Between two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize, there is no veil, and there can be no obstacle. Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Mistake, Blessing

  Henry David Thoreau (1973). “Winter: From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau”

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• I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.

  Will Self

  Phones, Age, Texting

  "The joy of text" by Will Self and Lynne Truss, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2008.

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• The damned are in the abyss of Hell, as within a woeful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments, in all their senses and members, because as they have employed all their senses and their members in sinning, so shall they suffer in each of them the punishment due to sin.

  Saint Francis de Sales

  Punishment, Cities, Suffering

  "Introduction to the Devout Life". Book by Saint Francis de Sales, Pt. 2, ch. 15, 1609.

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• O majesty unspeakable and dread!Wert thou less mighty than Thou art,Thou wert, O Lord, too great for our belief,Too little for our heart.

  Frederick William Faber

  Art, Littles, Majesty

  Frederick William Faber (1875). “Hymns”, p.20

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• Gazing around, looking up at the lofty pinnacles above, which seemed to pierce the sky, looking down upon the world,-\-\it seemed the whole world, so limitless it stretched away at her feet,-\-\feeling that infinite unspeakable sense of nearness to Heaven, remoteness from earth which comes only on mountain heights, she drew in a long breath of delight, and cried: "At last! at last, Alessandro! Here we are safe! This is freedom! This is joy!

  Helen Hunt Jackson

  Sky, Feet, Long

  Helen Hunt Jackson (2008). “Ramona”, p.323, Broadview Press

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• Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism - the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.

  George Eliot

  Pain, Grief, Baptism

  "Adam Bede". Book by George Eliot, 1859.

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• How glorious and near to the angels is youth that is clean. This youth has joy unspeakable here and eternal happiness hereafter. Sexual purity is youth's most precious possession. It is the foundation of all righteousness.

  Harold B. Lee

  Happiness, Angel, Joy

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• The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.

  Meg Rosoff

  Hate, Voice, People

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• The best pictures are always those one dreams of when one is smoking a pipe in bed, but which never get done. But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Dream, Perfection, Smoking

  Vincent Van Gogh (2013). “Van Gogh on Art and Artists: Letters to Emile Bernard”, p.64, Courier Corporation

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• To forgive somebody is to say one way or another, "You have done something unspeakable, and by all rights I should call it quits between us. Both my pride and my principles demand no less. However, although I make no guarantees that I will be able to forget what you've done, and though we may both carry the scars for life, I refuse to let it stand between us. I still want you for my friend.

  Frederick Buechner

  Forgiveness, Pride, Rights

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jun 21, 2013

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• What a blessing that God allows a life to come through your body, and then allows you to place that body in a body bag and take it out. I had to say that there's a magnificent something that God has for me to do, to give me that level of completion. That level of experience. It's unspeakable.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Blessing, Giving, Bags

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• Christmas is based on an exchange of gifts, the gift of God to man - His unspeakable gift of His Son, and the gift of man to God - when we present our bodies a living sacrifice.

  Vance Havner

  Christmas, Son, Sacrifice

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• "All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
  "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
  There was a long silence.
  "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

  Aldous Huxley

  Pain, Cancer, Long

  "Brave New World". Book by Aldous Huxley. Chapter 17, 1932.

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• Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.

  James A. Baldwin

  Passion, Challenges, Friendly

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• A member of Parliament to Disraeli: 'Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.' That depends, Sir,' said Disraeli, 'whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Mistress, Disease, Embrace

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