Unnamed Feeling Quotes

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

He let out a sigh. With my head there against his chest, I could faintly make out the sound of his heart beating through his suit coat. It seemed to be rushing. His hand, gentle as ever, reached to cup my cheek. As I looked into his eyes, I felt that unnameable feeling that was growing between us. With his eyes, Maxon asked for something we'd both agree to wait on. I was glad he didn't want to wait anymore. I gave him a tiny nod, and he bridged the small gap between us, kissing me with unimaginable tenderness.

Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

We let them help because they needed it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we are usefel in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute."---Cullen

I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we'll have that, one must have something, it's a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that's enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there's only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it's steps coming and going, it's voices speaking for a moment, it's bodies groping their way, it's the air, it's things, it's the air among the things, that's enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it's not clear, dear dear, you say it's not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I'll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I'm always seeking something, it's tiring in the end, and it's only the beginning.

I don’t know: perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don’t know, that’s all words), never wake (all words, there’s nothing else). You must go on, that’s all I know. They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I? You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.) It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spirtiual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit inot the world.

You have no idea what you do to me, how you make me feel,” Jackson says as his jaw ticks, trying to control some unnamed emotion. “I’m going to take you now. Make you mine.

...You won't remember what belongs there. You will only feel the ache of absence & know something unnamable is missing

A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

I care about strangers when they're abstractions but feel almost nothing when they are literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was poorly written by me.

I had a dream about you. It's been a while since I could remember any of my dreams, and still, this one has left me with such strong impression. Even now, when I am fully awake, your face flashes before my eyes. It's a face I can totally relate to, as if it wasn't any more yours than it is mine. Terrifying thing, you know? I can't say I've felt that sort of intimacy with anyone. For a moment you knew all my secrets, without me even having to tell them. For a moment I even knew them myself… While I was looking into your eyes, I suddenly started to realize things about myself that were unspoken for years, like fragments of my inner life that were deeply repressed. It’s hard to distinguish if they were buried inside because dealing with them was such a dirty work, or if leaving them unnamed meant that it was not possible to define them precisely enough, so they would keep their true meaning. Perhaps, all this life that I've known so far was in fact no more but a dream about living. The only thing that has kept me in touch with reality was you… I know it comes as a surprise, and you may be wondering why it took me so long to come clean. You also may be wondering how come you've never noticed before. I've tricked you on purpose, yes, and you must realize it really has nothing to do with you. It’s always been me. This is why, seeing you in my dream like that, came out as a shock. You also must forgive me. You must forgive me because I know how it looks like, that everything we ever shared was a lie, and it wasn't… I am more of an illusionist that a deceiver, but it all comes from being in fact, a very private person. Even if it was true that you knew me better than anyone, I’d never admit it. I’d rather dig my own heart out, with a rotten spoon, than admitting it. I may let people in my own little world occasionally, but I would never let them be aware of it. I don’t throw my intimacy in front of others, especially when I care. The more I care, the less I give away, and this is something for you to understand, and grant me your forgiveness. I didn't play my tricks on you in order to deceive you, but rather to save myself, and maybe even deceive myself as well. I’ve had hidden my feelings for you so deeply that I've learned to live with them, as if any other casualty. I have done wrong to myself as much as I did to you, and I don’t know if I can forgive myself. So now I wonder, could you forgive me without feeling sorry for me? I certainly don’t deserve your pity. Especially not now that I am awake.

For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about the homeless man. Apart from pity, there was another feeling, unnameable somehow—a kind of fear. I pictured him as a baby in his mother’s arms. Did she ever imagine her baby would end up crazy, dirty and stinking, huddled on the pavement, muttering obscenities?

Surely some of you have felt the same way that I do. You have turned sullenly from those thousands of glowing, perfect teeth lighting the American landscape and slouched to the darkness—the half-lighted room, the twilight forest, the empty café. There you have sat and settled into the bare, hard fact that the world is terrible in its beauty, indifferent much of the time, incoherent and nervous and resplendent when on certain evenings, when the clouds are right, a furious owl swooshes luridly from the horizon. You feel that sweet pressure behind your eyes, as if you would at any minute explode into hot tears. You long to languish in this unnamed sadness, this vague sense that everything is precious because it is dying, because you can never hold it, because it exists for only an instant.

When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.

It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.

As I looked into his eyes, I felt that unnameable feeling that was growing between us.

I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.

The mind will say this forever. But I mostly fish rivers these dayas. In so doing, movement becomes stasis, flux is the constant, and everything flows around, through, and beyond me, escaping ungrasped, unnamed, and unscathed. The river's clean escape does not prevent belief in its reality. On the contrary, there is nothing I love more than the feel of a wholeness sliding toward, around, and past me while I stand like an idiot savant in its midst, focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic bits of what is so beautiful to me, and so close, yet so wondrously ungraspable.

People didn't like having to come up with something smart or helpful or sensitive to say, and they weren't intelligent enough to realize that all we wanted, all I wanted, was to be treated the same as I had been three months before. I wanted to be ignored because of my eccentricities, not because of my brother. And I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling. So, if you feel sorry for someone, don't pretend to be happy. Don't pretend to care only about their problems. People aren't stupid. Not all of us, anyway. If someone's little brother disappears, don't give him a free hamburger to make him feel better-- it doesn't work. It's a good burger, sure, but it means nothing. It means something only to the Mr. Burkes of the world. Offering free meals, free stays in condos in Florida, even free plumbing. And we let them. We let them because they need it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we were useful in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute. So, old ladies, make your casseroles and set them on doorsteps. And old men, grill your burgers and give them to teenagers with cynical worldviews. The world can't be satisfied, but that need to fix it all can.

Yes, I feel the moment has come for me to look back, if I can, and take my bearings, if I am to go on. If only I knew what I had been saying. Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same as ever. I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them. I have only to go on, as if there was something to be done, something begun, somewhere to go. It all boils down to a question of words, I must not forget this, I have not forgotten it. But I must have said this before, since I say it now.

Things — identifiable objects, products, goals with clear labels and price tags, men you've known for five minutes — make such a handy repository for hungers, such an easy mask for other desires, and such a ready cure for the feelings of edgy discontent that emerge when other desires are either thwarted or unnamed.

My homesickness wasn't truly for home, I realized. It was for something more elusive. A silent, low-grade, unnamed yearning persisted inside me. It was always there, a reaching feeling that grew stronger when I was alone and listened for it. The rain understood what it was.

When we sit we recognize the crucial, divine importance of absolutely everything that arises—every thought, every feeling, every breath, every unspeakable, unnameable impulse. But also we recognize the ultimate importance of the others—of the sky, of all the sounds inside and outside the room. As the mind becomes a little more quiet the sacredness of everything within and without becomes clear to us.

But now he knows these hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all that too quite differently disposed.

It's not an honest face. It's not a kind face. It's a face made of anger and secrets and lies. From the tight, guarded mouth to the clenched, square jaw to the glossy shimmer of I-dare-you that coats the surface of her eyes, Aimee's face is a scary place for Meghan's gaze to rest. But beneath the gloss, behind the sharpness and tension, deep at Aimee's core, Meghan can see something warm and real. It's the same unnameable thing she saw in the sickroom on the first day of school. It's the same thing she feels pulsing softly deep in her own chest.

...each day I sit down in purposeful concentration to write in a notebook, some sentences on a buried truth, an unnamed reality, things that happened but are denied. It is hard to describe the stillness it takes, the difficulty of this act. It requires an almost perfect concentration which I am trying to learn and there is no way to learn it that is spelled out anywhere or so I can understand it but I have a sense that it's completely simply, on the order of being able to sit still and keep your mind dead center in you without apology or fear. I squirm after some time but it ain't boredom, it's fear of what's possible, how much you can know if you can be quiet enough and simple enough. I move around, my mind wanders, I lose the ability to take words and roll them through my brain, move with them into their interiors, feel their colors, touch what's under them, where they come from long ago and way back. I get frightened seeing what's in my own mind if words get put to it. There's a light there, it's bright, it's wide, it could make you blind if you look direct into it and so I turn away, afraid; I get frightened and I run and the only way to run is to abandon the process altogether or compromise it beyond recognition. I think about Celine sitting with his shit, for instance; I don't know why he didn't run, he should've. It's a quality you have to have of being near mad and at the same time so quiet in your heart that you could pass for a spiritual warrior; you could probably break things with the power in your mind. You got to be able to stand it, because it's a powerful and disturbing light, not something easy and kind, it comes through your head to make its way onto the page and you get fucking scared so your mind runs away, it wanders, it gets distracted, it buckles, it deserts, it takes a Goddamn freight train if it can find one, it wants calming agents and sporifics, and you mask that you are betraying the brightest and the best light you will ever see, you are betraying the mind that can be host to it... ...Your mind does stupid tricks to mask that you are betraying something of grave importance. It wanders so you won't notice that you are deserting your own life, abandoning it to triviality and garbage, how you are too fucking afraid to use your own brain for what it's for, which is to be a host to the light, to use it, to focus it; let it shine and carry the burden of what is illuminated, everything buried there; the light's scarier than anything it shows, the pure, direct experience of it in you as if your mind ain't the vegetable thing it's generally conceived to be or the nightmare thing you know it to be but a capacity you barely imagined, real; overwhelming and real, pushing you out to the edge of ecstasy and knowing and then do you fall or do you jump or do you fly?

Being with you, Will, it feels like…being home.” He leaned in, brushed her lips with his, the kiss tender. Full of too much unnamed emotion that threatened to make her cry.

The unfamiliar feeling surfaces, swelling in my chest, unnamed and dangerous.

that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

I hadn't just left my mother in the Unnamed Sea. I'd left my home. The place I'd taken my first breaths. But I could feel in my bones that these unknown waters were the place I'd take my last.

Countless people live their whole lives without ever knowing this...this unnameable thing that we share. This exclusive and secret club that we are so blessed to be a part of. I suppose that by many people's definition, it would simply be called 'Love'. And yet, this is unlike any other love or feeling or emotion that I have ever felt. Simply calling it 'Love' would be an injustice...it would do a massive disservice to this feeling that seems to envelop me with every breath I take. It's as if wherever I go, it goes; and whichever direction I look, it sees. It moves with me as if we've been doing this dance forever...like we are one being and of one mind. It has to uncanny ability to affect change by just existing; it speaks to me and with me and through me and every time it says my name, it cloaks my entire being with a warm comforting familiar glow...like it's only ever meant to be said that way and no different. It's not just simply love...it's everything.

There was one novel above all others, Knight said, that sparked in him the rare and unnerving sensation that writer was reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. "I recognize myself in the main character," he said, referring to the angry and misanthropic narrator, who has lived apart form all others for about twenty years. The book's opening lines are: "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man I am an unattractive man." Knight also expressed no shortage of self-loathing, but it was offset by a fierce pride, as well as an occasional trace of superiority. So, too, with the unnamed narrator of Underground . On the final page of the book, the narrator drops all humbleness and says what he feels: "I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.

She doesn't know what to call it—this free-falling sensation she feels every time she looks at Taylor, like her hands are closing again and again on emptiness—but she thinks she knows better than to call it love.

Maybe a reason why a particular decision you are carrying today feels difficult is because there are things beneath the surface that remain unnamed within you, things you either haven't acknowledged or would rather ignore. Sometimes indecision is the result of a busy schedule or a hesitant personality. Other times it's because something within us remains unnamed, and we simply don't have enough information or self-knowledge to move forward.

She--the unnamed lady--simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born.

If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren’t so hard anymore. Therefore, I listed what I had learned: 1. It’s easy to forget that people can think you think what you don’t think. 2. Don’t write when you’re angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don’t. 3. A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

Out of nowhere, I'm taken up in an unnameable ecstasy. The kind that comes from no specific wellspring and overflows before you even knew it was building in you. Everything is so beautiful, so good, you feel like you don't even need to breathe air anymore.

Can it be out of discretion, and a reluctance to hurt, that they affect to be unaware of my existence? But this is a refinement of feeling which can hardly be attributed to the dogs that come pissing against my abode, apparently never doubting that it contains some flesh and bones.

As a little kid, an unnamed fear would often overtake me. It wasn’t a fear of anything tangible—tigers, burglars, homelessness—and it couldn’t be solved by usual means like hugging my mother or turning on Nickelodeon shows. The feeling was cold and resided just below my stomach. It made everything around me seem unreal and unsafe.

Sean stands at the edge of the surf, looking out at the sea, and there is something curious and longing in his expression, like he, too, wishes to leap into the ocean and be gone. I think, just then, that this is why Norman Falk asked for Sean to be there. Not because he was the only one who could perform the ritual. But because Sean Kendrick, looking like that, is the races, even if no race was ever run. A reminder of what the horses mean to the island — a bridge between what we are and that thing about Thisby that we all want but can’t seem to touch. When Sean stands there, his face turned out to the sea, he is no more civilized than any of the capaill uisce, and it unsettles me. My heart feels full and empty with all of the beginnings and endings. Tomorrow is the races with all of their strategy and danger and hope and fear, and on the other side of it is Gabe getting into a boat and leaving us. I feel like Sean looking out over the ocean. I’m so full of an unnamed wanting that I can’t bear it.

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm, that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.

When I contacted her about my research, Dr. Dalmau's colleague Dr. Rita Balice-Gorodn brought up the old Indian proverb, often used by neuroscientists studying the brain, about six blind men trying to identify an elephant, offering it as a way of understanding how much more we have to learn about the disease. Each man grabs hold of a different part of the animal and tries to identify the unnamed object. One man touches the tail and says, "rope"; one touches a leg and says, "pillar"; one feels a trunk and says, "tree"; one feels an ear and says, "fan"; one feels the belly and says, "wall"; the last one feels the tusk and is certain it's a "pipe." (The tale has been told so many times that the outcomes differ widely. In a Buddhist iteration, the mean are told they are all correct and rejoice; in another, the men break out in violence when they can't agree.) Dr. Balice-Gordon has a hopeful interpretation of the analogy: "We're sort of approaching the elephant from the front end and from the back end in the hopes of touching in the middle. We're hoping to paint a detailed enough landscape of the elephant.

he doesn’t have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he never will belong anywhere. Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me.

Unhappy Dives! in an evil hour 'Gainst Nature's voice seduced to deeds accurst! Once Fortune's minion, now thou feel'st her power; Wrath's vial on thy lofty head bath burst. In Wit, in Genius, as in Wealth the first, How wondrous bright thy blooming morn arose! But thou went smitten with th' unhallow'd thirst Of crime un-named, and thy sad noon must close In scorn, and solitude unsought, the worst of woes.

I know that it was around this time that I started having a recurring dream. In it, I find myself on the streets of some unnamed city, a neighborhood with trees, storefronts, light traffic. The day is pleasant and warm, with a soft breeze, and people are out shopping or walking their dogs or coming home from work. In one version I'm riding a bike, but most often I'm on foot, and I'm strolling along, without any thoughts in particular, when suddenly I realize that no one recognizes me. My security detail is gone. there's nowhere I have to be. My choices have no consequence. I wander into a corner store and buy a bottle of water or iced tea, making small talk with the person behind the counter. I settle down on a nearby bench, pop open the cap on my drink, take a sip, and just watch the world passing by. I feel like I've won the lottery.

With Helen he doesn't feel shameful things, he doesn't find himself saying weird stuff during sex, he doesn't have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he never will belong anywhere. Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not. William Styron renders an eloquent description of “the many dreadful manifestations of the disease,” among them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a “dank joylessness” with “gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety.”14 Then there are the intellectual marks: “confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memories,” and, at a later stage, his mind “dominated by anarchic distortions,” and “a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.” There are the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a zombie, “a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility,” along with a “fidgety restlessness.” Then there is the loss of pleasure: “Food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.” Finally, there was the vanishing of hope as the “gray drizzle of horror” took on a despair so palpable it was like physical pain, a pain so unendurable that suicide seemed a solution. In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new beginnings emerge. The very symptoms of depression bespeak a life on hold. For

Connell thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy. With Helen he doesn’t feel shameful things, he doesn’t find himself saying weird stuff during sex, he doesn’t have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he never will belong anywhere. Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried. In the cold light of the experience he know that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact does not govern.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

The Darkling is a living amplifier,” Fedyor said. “That’s what you felt.” “Like the claws? That’s his power?” “One of his powers,” corrected Ivan. I pulled the kefta tighter around me, feeling suddenly cold. I remembered the surety that had flooded through me with the Darkling’s touch, and that strangely familiar sensation of a call echoing through me, a call that demanded an answer. It had been frightening, but exhilarating, too. In that moment, all my doubt and fear had been replaced by a kind of absolute certainty. I was no one, a refugee from an unnamed village, a scrawny, clumsy girl hurtling alone through the gathering dark. But when the Darkling had closed his fingers around my wrist, I’d felt different, like something more. I shut my eyes and tried to focus, tried to remember that feeling of certainty, to bring that sure and perfect power into blazing life.

She thinks she’s fighting against lethargy. She does jumping jacks in the motel courtyard, calls her best friend in Juneau from the motel pay phone and anxiously tries to reminisce about their shitty high school band. They sing an old song together, and she feels almost normal. But increasingly she finds herself powerless to resist the warmth that spreads through her chest, the midday paralysis, the hunger for something slow and deep and unnameable. Some maid has drawn the blackout curtains. One light bulb dangles. The dark reminds Angie of packed earth, moisture. What she interprets as sprawling emotion is the Joshua tree. Here was its birth, in the sands of Black Rock Canyon. Here was its death, and its rebirth as a ghostly presence in the human. Couldn’t it perhaps Leap back into that older organism? The light bulb pulses in time with Angie’s headache. It acquires a fetal glow, otherworldly.

There are vast differences of experience within those categories, so consider their use to be broad guideposts for how anti-fatness can impact fat people at different sizes. THIN AND NON-FAT describe those whose bodies are thinner than fat people’s, and who receive social, cultural, and institutional privileges on the basis of that thinness and proximity to thinness. Those same people may describe themselves as “feeling fat” or may not describe their own bodies as thin. But the privileges we receive are based more on how others perceive us than how we perceive ourselves. Because fatness is often defined relative to thinness, thinness itself often goes unnamed, treated as a default not worth commenting on. But tackling biased myths against fat people requires naming thinness too, so that we can identify the ways in which these myths allow some thin and small fat people to evade and perpetuate anti-fatness by aligning themselves with thinness instead.

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best. . . . I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is. The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler. . . . I have some good friends here, but no one who really understands why I am here or what I do. I don’t know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far alone. I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had more wild adventures than ever before. And what magnificent country I have seen—wild, tremendous wasteland stretches, lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward from the vermilion sands of the desert, canyons five feet wide at the bottom and hundreds of feet deep, cloudbursts roaring down unnamed canyons, and hundreds of houses of the cliff dwellers, abandoned a thousand years ago.

Thanks for helping me clean up. Still can't understand a man willing to help out in the kitchen, though. You sure it wasn't just so you could question me?" "I'm sure. Why do you find that so hard to believe?" He stood directly in front of her, so close Willow could feel his warm breath on her cheek. "I..." Her heart burst into a drumroll. A rush of hot blood spilled into all the places she'd always considered private. What was this magic? Without so much as a light caress, he stole her senses and left her trembling with an unnameable desire. She struggled against the sudden heightening of her senses. What was it I'd been about to say? Oh,yes. "Well," she began, "you're a man." Rider chuckled softly, the sound rippling down her spine. "You noticed that, did you?" She exhaled in exasperation. "Be quiet and let me finish. And stand back." She pushed against his chest, then yanked her hands away as if burnt. "I can't breathe with you caging me in like this." He arched a dark eyebrow but politely stepped to her side and leaned his shoulder against the house. "Better?" "It'll do." He was still too close as far as Willow was concerned, but she'd be damned if she'd let him know how he affected her. "You got me off the subject, Sinclair." "I did?" "Yes,you...Never mind.

A Favorite start to a book [sorry it's long!]: "In yesterday’s Sunday Times, a report from Francistown in Botswana. Sometime last week, in the middle of the night, a car, a white American model, drove up to a house in a residential area. Men wearing balaclavas jumped out, kicked down the front door, and began shooting. When they had done with shooting they set fire to the house and drove off. From the embers the neighbors dragged seven charred bodies: two men, three women, two children. Th killers appeared to be black, but one of the neighbors heard them speaking Afrikaans among themselves. And was convinced they were whites in blackface. The dead were South Africans, refugees who had moved into the house mere weeks ago. Approached for comment, the SA Minister of Foreign Affairs, through a spokesman, calls the report ‘unverified’. Inquiries will be undertaken, he says, to determine whether the deceased were indeed SA citizens. As for the military, an unnamed source denies that the SA Defence Force had anything to do with the matter. The killings are probably an internal ANC matter, he suggests, reflecting ‘ongoing tensions between factions. So they come out, week after week, these tales from the borderlands, murders followed by bland denials. He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to! Yet where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled? Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks? How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit. ‘I see the Defense Force is up to its old tricks again,’ he remarks to his father. ‘In Botswana this time.’ But his father is too wary to rise to the bait. When his father picks up the newspaper, he cares to skip straight to the sports pages, missing out the politics—the politics and the killings. His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording over them. ‘They broke into a house in Francistown and killed everyone,’ he presses on nonetheless. ‘Executed them .Including the children. Look. Read the report. It’s on the front page.’ His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on one hand, thugs who slaughter defenceless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response—fits of anger and despair—any better?" Summertime, Coetzee

I don’t like to think too much about you, in my head, that only makes a mess of us both. But of course what I live for now is for you and me to live together. I’m frightened, really...I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. So they won’t be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me. We’ll be together next year. And though I’m frightened, I believe in your being with me. A man has to fend and fettle for the best, and then trust in something beyond himself. You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it’s the only thing in the world. I’ve got no friends, not inward friends. Only you. And now the little flame is all I care about in my life.. It’s my Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you... Me and God is a bit uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That’s what I abide by, and will abide by... “That’s why I don’t like to start thinking about you actually. It only tortures me, and does you no good. I don’t want you to be away from me. But if I start fretting it wastes something. Patience, always patience. This is my fortieth winter. And I can’t help all the winters that have been. But this winter I’ll stick to my little pentecost flame, and have some peace. And I won’t let the breath of people blow it out. I believe in a higher mystery, that doesn’t let even the crocus be blown out. And if you’re in Scotland and I’m in the Midlands, and I can’t put my arms round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I’ve got something of you. My soul softly flaps in the little pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause. “So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander! What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to be chaste in the cool between-whiles, as by a river. “Well, so many words, because I can’t touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure. “Never mind, never mind, we won’t get worked up. We really trust in the little flame, in the unnamed god that shields it from being blown out. There’s so much of you here with me, really, that it’s a pity you aren’t all here. “Never mind about Sir Clifford. If you don’t hear anything from him, never mind. He can’t really do anything to you. Wait, he will want to get rid of you at last, to cast you out. And if he doesn’t, we’ll manage to keep clear of him. But he will. In the end he will want to spew you out as the abominable thing. “Now I can’t even leave off writing to you. “But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and steer our courses to meet soon. John Thomas says good night to lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.

This consciousness is never still, not even for a moment. It will not be photographed or even named. In its wanting to become aware, it rearranges itself in one pattern after another. Feel it now in the blinking of your eyes. The moisture on your tongue. The gentle filling and emptying of your lungs. It rises unnamed through us, the incessant motion of the four creatures bearing the chariot in Ezekiel s vision: human, lion, ox, and eagle, running and returning. Creation is in us. The plan the Creator used reappears everywhere:

The way in which art creates desire, I guess that’s everywhere. Is there anyone who hasn’t come out of a movie or a play or a concert filled with an unnameable hunger? … To stand in front of one of [Louis Sullivan’s] buildings and look up, or in front, say, of the facade of Notre Dame, is both to have a hunger satisfied that you maybe didn’t know you had, and also to have a new hunger awakened in you. I say “unnameable,” but there’s a certain kind of balance achieved in certain works of art that feels like satiety, a place to rest, and there are others that are like a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us, wonder or terror or longing. I suppose that’s why people who write about aesthetics want to distinguish between the beautiful and sublime… Beauty sends out ripples, like a pebble tossed in a pond, and the ripples as they spread seem to evoke among other things a stirring of curiosity. The aesthetic effect of a Vermeer painting is a bit like that. Some paradox of stillness and motion. Desire appeased and awakened.

Frances is feeling a familiar yet unnameably old feeling. One she hadn't known was ever hers to forget. Happiness.

The thing stank of unnamed yearnings, unfulfilled wishes, and a hunger so deep it make her feel hollow inside.

Are you stuffocating too? Stuffocation is the story of one of today’s most acute, till now unnamed, afflictions. It is about how you, me, and society in general, instead of feeling enriched by the things we own, are feeling stifled by them. Instead

Maude couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy towards this unnamed, supernatural creature who had bewitched Matt long enough to make him wait for her, for hours no less, in a museum.

I've loved words and I've hated them, but I've never been indifferent to them. I've spent the last few years fearing them, the way they have the power to give life to the things you feel, things that are safer left unnamed.

I’m sorry if my words hurt you earlier. I thought I’d been pretty clear about my not wanting kids.” Alex winced, but tried to cover it by tucking her hair behind her right ear. “You were. I remember you saying it the first night. But we clicked on everything else and I guess I thought you might possibly start to rethink your position.” He could understand why she would think that. They had clicked on everything. She’d fit into his house as if she’d always been here. Hell, she fit into his life as if she’d always been there. All of the worries he’d had about her youth had faded. She was more mature for her age than most of the men he knew, and that was the truth. “I don’t want this,” he motioned between them, “to end because of just this one thing.” She frowned. “I hope you didn’t mean that the way it sounded, because that one thing is very important to me. I’m almost thirty-two. As trite as it is to say, my childbearing time is ticking away.” Duncan growled, pissed that he couldn’t articulate his feelings the way he needed to. He was losing her, he could see it in her eyes. “I don’t want the responsibility of children, but I don’t want our physical or emotional relationship to end. I enjoy having you in my life.” She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “It’s convenient, right? Having a woman in your house and bed, falling in love with you? I can’t just be ‘enjoyed’ Duncan, I need more that that. I felt like we had a deeper connection than that.” Scowling, he turned to look at the cold fireplace. Then her words slowly sank in. She’d said she was falling in love with him. Fuck… Alex muttered a curse under her breath and pushed to her feet to pace. Duncan watched her move, thoughts swirling in his mind. She thought she loved him, but she’d only been here a couple of days. Yes, they’d been together the entire time since she’d been here, but surely she didn’t think she loved him. Maybe she was less mature than he thought. No one could decide to tie themselves to a man that quickly, let alone a disabled veteran destined to have long-term emotional and medical issues. She paused in her pacing, as if coming to a decision. “I think I’m going to go home.” The words fell into the silence and he lost his breath. But he couldn’t blame her. She wanted more than he could give her. Once again, like with Melanie, he was being tossed over for another man, this one just so far unnamed. “If you make your reservations, I can drive you whenever you need me to.” She blinked at him, a strange expression on her face, then she shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it was ending. He couldn’t either. “All right. Goodnight.” Duncan

So he is. So that faint uneasiness lost. That faint hope. To one with so few occasions to feel. So inapt to feel. Asking nothing better in so far as he can ask anything than to feel nothing. Is it desirable? No. Would he gain thereby in companionability? No. Then let him not be named H. Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You.

An hour later he lay awake beside Loretta, staring at the firelight that played upon the walls of his lodge. Red Buffalo’s words haunted him. If Loretta had to choose, would she forsake him for her people? He knew she was awake by the sound of her breathing, but her voice still startled him when she spoke. “Hunter, what’s wrong? Surely you’re not still stewing over the scalp. It upset me, but I’m over it now.” He turned to regard her. There were shadows in her eyes, and she was as pale as bleached bones. “You lie, Blue Eyes. Many of your people are dead, by my cousin’s hand, and their spirits wail and call out to you.” “It wasn’t you who killed them. That’s all that counts.” Hunter’s chest tightened. One day he would ride into battle again--to slay White Eyes. It was inevitable. How would she feel about that? “You are Comanche now, yes?” he said hopefully. “One with us.” Indefinable emotions played across her face. “I’m married to a Comanche. I love him. But I’ll never be a Comanche.” Hunter studied her features, once so repulsive to him, now so cherished. He ran a finger up the fragile bridge of her nose, then traced the line of her brow, acutely conscious of the small bones that shaped her face. Protectiveness welled within him. “You are one with me, one with my people. You cannot stand with one foot on Comanche land and the other on tosi tivo land.” “Both my feet are here, Hunter, but part of my heart is at my wooden walls. No matter how much I love you, that will never change. You are one with me, too. Does that make you one with the tosi tivo?” An unnameable fear grew within him. He felt very much as he had several summers ago when he had been caught in a flash flood, swept along by the raging water. The Comanche struggle for survival was like that, surging forward, catching up everyone in its path. Men like Red Buffalo fed its fury.

You will walk backward in your footsteps and go forward a new way?” “I--” He slid her hand upward so it rested on his shoulder, forcing her closer. His height was such that she had to tip her head back to see his face. If he had been a white man, she would have been worrying that he planned to kiss her. But he wasn’t a white man. And she doubted gentle persuasion was what he had in mind. He seemed a yard wide at the shoulders, a looming wall of muscle. There was heat in the depths of his eyes as he studied her, a heat that had never been there before. “I would have you beside me,” he told her huskily. “But you promised to take me home.” The stallion nickered and sidestepped, pulling both of them off balance. Hunter released the horse to catch her, his arm encircling her waist. Loretta snapped taut when his hard thighs pressed intimately against hers. He bent his head and nuzzled her hair, his breath sifting through the strands to her scalp. A shiver ran through her. For a moment she struggled against him, but then she felt as if an invisible web were entwining itself around her, the silken threads binding her so she couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She closed her eyes, wildly afraid, of him and what he was making her feel. She tried desperately to conjure an image of her mother, anything to break the spell. Perhaps he knew how to be gently persuasive after all. She knew she should pull away, yet an unnameable something held her transfixed. His mouth trailed to the slope of her neck, sending tingles down her spine. A treacherous languor stole into her limbs. Heat spread through her belly. For an instant she wanted to lean against him, to let his wonderfully strong arms mold her to his length.

I would have you beside me,” he told her huskily. “But you promised to take me home.” The stallion nickered and sidestepped, pulling both of them off balance. Hunter released the horse to catch her, his arm encircling her waist. Loretta snapped taut when his hard thighs pressed intimately against hers. He bent his head and nuzzled her hair, his breath sifting through the strands to her scalp. A shiver ran through her. For a moment she struggled against him, but then she felt as if an invisible web were entwining itself around her, the silken threads binding her so she couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She closed her eyes, wildly afraid, of him and what he was making her feel. She tried desperately to conjure an image of her mother, anything to break the spell. Perhaps he knew how to be gently persuasive after all. She knew she should pull away, yet an unnameable something held her transfixed. His mouth trailed to the slope of her neck, sending tingles down her spine. A treacherous languor stole into her limbs. Heat spread through her belly. For an instant she wanted to lean against him, to let his wonderfully strong arms mold her to his length. The shock of his hand on her bare back brought her to her senses. Her eyes flew open, and she gasped. She tried to arch away from him and succeeded only in accommodating his mouth when her head fell back. He pressed his lips to the hollow of her throat, where her pulse beat a rapid tattoo. His callused palm slid slowly but inexorably to her side, his thumb feathering against the underside of her breast. Horrified, she groped for his wrist, her fingers finding feeble purchase through the leather. “Ah, nei mah-tao-yo,” he whispered. “You tremble.

Parents who have experienced trauma often have excessive feelings of fear and worry that an unnamed catastrophic event is going to happen, so they try to exert control over their children in an attempt to keep them safe from harm. This behavior is intended to protect children, but instead, the adults model anxiety and the children internalize the fears and worries of their parents as their own. The fears of the parents become the fears of the children.

These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace; they were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death.” Standing at an altar assembled from remnants of wooden refugee boats, Pope Francis looked out over the port of Lampedusa and asked his audience, “Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept?” He went on to ask, “Who is responsible for this blood?”—observing that “today no one in our world feels responsible. . . . We have become used to the suffering of others. . . . The globalization of indifference makes us all ‘unnamed,’ responsible, yet nameless and faceless.

Psalm 46:10 is an invitation to be still and know he is God. There’s a reason why God invites us to be still first: the stillness makes way for the knowing. It creates space in the same way becoming a soul minimalist makes way for the naming of unnamed things. When I am constantly in motion, my body rehearses anxiety rather than practicing the unforced rhythms of grace. Ironically, in choosing to finally stop chasing something we don’t think we have, we may end up finding what was always there. Having an uncluttered soul isn’t a one-time declarative statement but an ongoing way of being. Sometimes I feel centered in the early morning only to lose it by breakfast. Rather than being a scattered person unable to do anything, I want to be a gathered person equipped to do her next right thing in love.

Life’s situations have a way of pulling emotions from you. The particularly trying moments stretching them so thin that you don’t really feel anymore. You just are. Existing as a drone, and nothing more. But in that state of numbness, those stretched emotions, however slender they may be, are still very much there. Yes, they are there. My mind fingers those emotions like strings of a harp, plucking at cords marked misery, sorrow, and grief, playing an unnamed piece that I will soon call vengeance.

In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones. This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year. As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.

She'd not only not run, she'd prepared to defend him--absurd as that was. He didn't know what to do with her, and he didn't have the faintest notion what to do with himself. He couldn't help but feel . . . He couldn't help but feel. All manner of emotions, and all of them at once. To begin, he was vaguely insulted by the suggestion that he might need help from a wisp of a girl. That led to a growing desire to possess her, to show her just who protected whom in this exchange. And then, beneath everything, there was some quiet, unnameable emotion that made him want to lay down his pride, rest his head in her lap, and weep.

I think it improper to talk about evil all during a meal. It spoils the digestion." "Oh, but come," the Witch said, "is it only in youth that we can have the nerve to as, ourselves such serious questions?' "Well, I stick with my suggestion," said Avaric. "Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward. There's no absolute value to behavior. First of all -" "Institutional inertia," claimed the Witch. "But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?" "That's why I say it's merely an affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed," said a copper magnate. "And we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehensible." "It's an absence of good, that's all," said his paramour, an agony aunt for the Shiz informer. "The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace." "Pigspittle," said Avaric. "Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn't progress..." "I think it's a presence, not an absence," said an artist. "Evil's an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It's an other. It's not us." "Not even me?" said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. "A self-confessed murderer?" "Oh go on with you," said the artist, "we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That's just normal vanity." "Evil isn't a thing, it's not a person, it's an attribute like beauty..." "It's a power, like wind..." "It's an infection..." "It's metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation -" "Blame it on the Unnamed God, then." "But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?" "it's not of air and eternity, evil isn't; it's of earth; it's physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing on another pain, no more no less -" "I like pain, if I'm wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me -" "No, you're all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart - the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend no to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience -" "Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.

I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the small room at the end of the hall to watch Steffie and Wilder sleep. I remained at this task, motionless, for nearly an hour, feeling refreshed and expanded in unnameable ways.

As she writes, she feels a warm assurance; she likes her phrasing, and her conclusions, which are not absolute. On the contrary, they retain an ambiguous hesitant air, a little like done thinking out loud. She rereads her first notes and at times disagrees with herself, and she loves that, she has always liked changing her mind. She thinks about Chaura Paillacar struggling with headaches and about the unnamed poet's jumpy eyes, and Aurelia Bala writing with both hands and Floridor Pérez with his son Chile, whom she imagines as a teenager every bit as skinny and gangly as the country that gave him the name he wanted to change at any cost. She thinks about Hernaldo Bravo just after he was hit by a car, in a hospital, writing poems out of pure boredom, and about the twins scribbling incessantly on the walls of Bernadita Socorro's small, light-filled apartment... that the world of Chilean poets is a little stupid but it is more genuine, less false than the ordinary lives of people who follow the rules and keep their heads down. Of course there is opportunism and cruelty, but also real passion and heroism and allegiance to dreams. She thinks that Chilean poets are stray dogs and stray dogs are Chilean poets and that she herself is a Chilean poet, poking her snout into the trash cans of an unknown city...

As she writes, she feels a warm assurance; she likes her phrasing, and her conclusions, which are not absolute. On the contrary, they retain an ambiguous, hesitant air, a little like someone thinking out loud. She rereads her first notes and at times disagrees with herself, and she loves that, she has always liked changing her mind. She thinks about Chaura Paillacar struggling with headaches and about the unnamed poet's jumpy eyes, and Aurelia Bala writing with both hands and Floridor Pérez with his son Chile, whom she imagines as a teenager every bit as skinny and gangly as the country that gave him the name he wanted to change at any cost. She thinks about Hernaldo Bravo just after he was hit by a car, in a hospital, writing poems out of pure boredom, and about the twins scribbling incessantly on the walls of Bernadita Socorro's small, light-filled apartment... that the world of Chilean poets is a little stupid but it is more genuine, less false than the ordinary lives of people who follow the rules and keep their heads down. Of course there is opportunism and cruelty, but also real passion and heroism and allegiance to dreams. She thinks that Chilean poets are stray dogs and stray dogs are Chilean poets and that she herself is a Chilean poet, poking her snout into the trash cans of an unknown city...

Dusty did not want to hope. She tried to keep hope out of her, shutting all the doors and locking them with the keys of reason and evidence and precedent. Still, she could feel it seeping in, incorporeal and deathless, refusing to be refused.

Cold comfort that is, to feel superior to one’s son, and hardly sufficient to calm the remorse of having begotten him. May

The artifacts are often what people latch on to most in a church, though they are expressions of so much beneath the surface. Imagine growing up in a healthy church. The church is generous, kind, nurturing, full of truth, and loving. You grow up loving your church. This church happens to have some programs that have deeply impacted you. Maybe it was a children’s program or a great worship ministry. In your mind, even without realizing it, your affinity for belief of the church is connected to the visible expressions of the church. Now, years long past that first church experience, artifacts that seem nearest to those original expressions will just feel right. Because of this, people are often really attached to the artifacts. While changing actual beliefs is the most difficult task, changing artifacts often creates the most pain. In order to understand culture, it is critical to recognize the differences in the layers. It is faster to correct unwanted behaviors or artifacts in a culture, but only addressing behavior is insufficient. Unless all the layers of culture are addressed, other deviant behaviors will pop up in the place of recently addressed ones. This game of behavioral whack-a-mole becomes an endless cycle of battling unnamed enemies underneath the surface. The unwanted behaviors are symptoms; an unhealthy culture is the sickness. Wherever we find stubborn sticking points in a church culture, there is always inconsistency between the actual beliefs and values and the stated ones. If there are deeply held assumptions and beliefs within the culture that are incompatible with the desired future that leaders are leading toward, then the beliefs beneath the surface must be addressed. If our churches are going to have strong cultures, there must be actual beliefs driven deeply into the church that are articulated and then expressed in artifacts. There will be harmony and congruence between all three layers of culture. The church won’t settle for mere alignment between the articulated values and the artifacts. The leaders will push for the actual beliefs to be deeply rooted in the church. The true beliefs and assumptions of a church culture are not only written on signs, posters, and e-mail footers. The truly embraced convictions of a local church are written in the lives of believers as they interact with one another and the world. Church leaders often

Thiel, what ties them together really is Gawker and what they’d come to feel about it. Gawker had not only incited a conspiracy, but in the course of the trial, its actions, its tone, its arrogance had fused its unknown, unnamed opponents together

The groans did not frighten her. As she watched, her heart thudded slow and steady; she felt something dark and unnamed shift deep within herself. That inner shifting and what she'd drawn on the wall seemed to go together; Maddy could feel the formlessness inside herself reaching out toward the wall, as if wanting to connect. She thought of Rhonda Hinkle standing before the class and proclaiming "I can!" She thought of David, his head down, saying, "Just an average, ordinary kid. A watcher and a knower." Well, that was what she was too - an average, ordinary kid now staring at some kind of knowing... a knowing that was undefined, something inside herself that wanted out. I can, Maddy thought.

I learned to suppress my shock at traumatic things. I learned to tell a real crisis from mere poverty. I learned that behavior that looks lazy or withdrawn to someone perched far above the poverty line can actually be a pacing technique. People like Crystal or Larraine cannot afford to give all their energy to today’s emergency only to have none left over for tomorrow’s. I saw in the trailer park and inner city resilience and spunk and brilliance. I heard a lot of laughter. But I also saw a lot of pain. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I wrote in my journal, “I feel dirty, collecting these stories and hardships like so many trophies.” The guilt I felt during my fieldwork only intensified after I left. I felt like a phony and like a traitor, ready to confess to some unnamed accusation. I couldn’t help but translate a bottle of wine placed in front of me at a university function or my monthly day-care bill into rent payments or bail money back in Milwaukee. It leaves an impression, this kind of work. Now imagine it’s your life.

I believe that, if Jane ever loved, it was this unnamed gentleman; but the acquaintance had been short, and I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness.

We pulled into the so-called safe zone, next to a pair of tow teams that had sidelined themselves, and as King reached past me to untether his camera case and assemble his housing, I started at Jaws. At about 40 feet, this wasn't the biggest day on record, but somehow that diminished nothing. The wave was breathtaking. As it rose, its face opened up to the cliffs and its lip curled over a full-bellied barrel. Except for the luminous glints of turquoise at its peak, the wave was sapphire blue, gin clear, and flecked with white. If heaven were a color it would be tinted like this. You could fall into this water and happily never come out and you could see it forever and never get tired of looking. Jaws did not permit its spectators to daydream about being someplace else, to feel bored or irritated or jaded. Watching it was an instant antidote to petty problems. There could be no confusion about who called the shots out here, at this gorgeous, haunted, heavy, lush, primordial place, with all its unnameable blues and its ability to nourish you and kill you at the same time. There was unspeakable power at Jaws, but it was the beauty that got me.

I snuggled up close against him. That way most fears would disappear, but I could feel an unnameable sadness within him and our fears mingled.

All along, I made you feel like you were the one who had done something terribly wrong. Always anxious, in an ongoing state of unnamable guilt and dread, I made you the carrier of your father’s sin. You carried it like a warrior. You carried it like a wound. You carried it like a mutated cell that later became illness.

Grief undulates, slips thin like air in and through heart, body, and soul. It moves unnamed, unknown. A fleeting thing that is, for better or worse, forever here to stay. What this book does not do—and what I could never do—is attempt to put a definitive grasp on grief. Grief cannot be quantified; it swells and looms large, only to shrivel and hide when sought out and sized. Grief is one thing to one person and presents a whole new face to another. It is emotion and embodied; it is expressed and it emits. It is body, spirit, mind, and soul. Hidden and seen. Felt and perceived. It is no one thing, for it is everything and everywhere all at once. It is in and around me. And—whether you feel it, fight it, or fear it—grief is in and around you too.