Unread Texts Quotes

Oh Beck, I love reading your e-mail. Learning your life. And I am careful; I always mark new messages unread so that you won't get alarmed. My good fortune doesn't stop there; You prefer e-mail. You don't like texting. So this means that I am not missing out on all that much communication. You wrote an "essay" for some blog in which you stated that "e-mails last forever. You can search for any word at any time and see everything you ever said to anyone about that one word. Texts go away." I love you for wanting a record. I love your records for being so accessible and I'm so full of you, your calendar of caloric intake and hookups and menstrual moments, your self-portraits you don't publish, your recipes and exercises. You will know me soon too, I promise.

Recently, my friend Erika called my cell phone. I will never understand why people insist upon calling my cell phone. It’s such an aggressive action to take: calling someone. Each time my phone rings, I have a heart attack like my pocket’s on fire and a tiny siren is going off. I’d also like to take this opportunity to address texting. Texting = Better Than Calling. Unless. Unless you are one of those people who doles out texts like IOUs. Unless you believe that whenever you feel like it, you can just poke at me, ping me, jump into my day like Hiiiiii and feel so entitled to a response that the next time I see you, you will arrange your face in an injured manner and say quietly, “Hey. You doing okay? I just never heard back…” At this moment, I have 183 unread texts. Texts are not the boss of me, and neither is anybody who texts me. I have decided, once and for all, that just because someone texts me does not obligate me to respond. If I believed differently, I’d walk around all day feeling anxious and indebted, responding instead of creating. Now that we’ve established why I have no friends, let’s return to Erika.

Jake still won’t talk to me, and I miss him so much, it’s like I’ve been hollowed out by a nuclear blast and there’s nothing left but ashes fluttering inside brittle bones. I’ve sent him dozens of texts that aren’t only unanswered; they’re unread. He unfriended me on Facebook and unfollowed me on Instagram and Snapchat. He’s pretending I don’t exist and I’m starting to think he’s right. If I’m not Jake’s girlfriend, who am I?

Don’t meet him. That monster has an agenda. Ren. Yuan’s CRAB forwards the text to his mind. So, he silences it. Why after two decades? Ren. It smells fishy. Ren. Just because he's a childhood buddy, you'll run to him? Ren. Maybe I didn’t see the Apocalypse with you, but I'm your war comrade, too. Ren. The texts stay unread in his CRAB.

Texts from the dead are better left unread

Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh ―‘Ain't you pale!’ she says ― but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.

Several paragraphs of dense text began to scroll across the screen, an unreadable blur of legalese outlining all the details of enlistment. It would have taken hours to read it all, and then I still probably wouldn’t have understood a word of it.

Friends were inspired to undercut each other with personal tidbits: Republican parents, unread seminal texts, porn predilections, leveraging weakness and sharing anecdotes that were wholly irrelevant to the work in question, all in the pursuit of power.

Mia had stacked them neatly inside: half portraits, half wishes, caught on paper. Each of the Richardsons, as Mrs. Richardson carefully laid the photos out on the table in a line, knew which was meant for them, recognized it instantly, as they might have recognized their own faces. To the others it was just another photo, but to them it was unbearably intimate, like catching a glimpse of your own naked body in a mirror. A sheet of paper sliced into strips, thin as matchsticks, woven to form a net. Suspended in its mesh: a rounded, heavy stone. The text had been sliced to unreadable bits, but Lexie recognized the pale pink of it

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.

The fact that the Qur'an "happens against a long background of patriarchal precedent" may also explain why its exegesis, the work entirely of men, has been influenced by their own needs and experiences while either excluding or interpreting, "through the male vision", perspective, desire, or needs". The resulting absence of women's voices from "the basic paradigms through which we examine and discuss the Qur'an and Qur'anic interpretation," argues Wadud, is mistaken "with voicelessness in the text itself"; and it is this silence that both explains and allows the striking consensus on women's issues among muslims in spite of interpretive differences among them.

But enslaved people were not uncritical or gullible in their appropriation of the biblical text. John Jea, already quoted as an example of early black reverence for the Scripture, also illustrates the ability of some slaves to distinguish between the reliability of the Bible’s content itself and the unreliable teaching of the Bible in the hands of some white masters. Jea recalls: After our master had been treating us in this cruel manner [severe floggings, sometimes unto death], we were obliged to thank him for the punishment he had been inflicting on us, quoting that Scripture which saith, “Bless the rod, and him that hath appointed it.” But, though he was a professor of religion, he forgot that passage which saith “God is love, and whoso dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” And, again, we are commanded to love our enemies; but it appeared evident that his wretched heart was hardened.8 Jea’s account and others like it teach us that African-American Christians trusted the Bible while they suspected the self-serving motives and Scripture-twisting actions of white preachers and slave owners. It’s fascinating to consider that a highly oral people revered the Scriptures they could not read even while they rejected the oracles of co-opted preachers they could hear. One could say that African-American Christianity began with an unread Bible placed on the center of the church’s ecclesial coffee table.

You could defend Ren’s codes. But you didn’t,” Yuan replies. “You wanted an excuse to talk about your source.” “But you said I don’t need defense from Ren Agnello.” Pico uses all its logic. “You said he passes the definitions of ‘friend’ and ‘trustworthy’ and ...” Pico begins a list of keywords. Yuan ignores the keywords. The thin lines on his forehead deepen, the wrinkles near his eyes tighten, and the frown in between his brows grows visible. These days, the word Source is coming frequently, ever since that man asked to meet. Don’t meet him. That monster has an agenda. Ren. Yuan’s CRAB forwards the text to his mind. So, he silences it. Why after two decades? Ren. It smells fishy. Ren. Just because he's a childhood buddy, you'll run to him? Ren. Maybe I didn’t see the Apocalypse with you, but I'm your war comrade, too. Ren. The texts stay unread in his CRAB.

This meant that I went from being the person who responded to everyone all the time, to being a person who doesn’t respond to hardly anyone, at all. At first, it was hard. My text inbox went from typically ten unread messages to over four hundred. I would read letters from readers, and instead of responding with a novel-length letter, I began saving them to a folder and sending out energetic blessings instead. If an email landed in my inbox, I would let it sit sometimes for up to seven days before even opening it. I got to things when I got to things. At first, some people were super annoyed, but after a few years of this practice, people came to understand I don’t respond to things immediately, and sometimes I don’t respond at all. To me, this is the only sane way to live. I’m not chained to my phone or to other people’s expectations of responsiveness. I don’t prove my love by texting back in two minutes.

Reacher saw a vertical array of green message bubbles. Texts. Unreadable foreign words, but mostly regular letters, the same as English. Some were doubled up. Some had strange accents above or below. Umlauts and cedillas.

As the next page loaded with another set of 25 emails, his eyes were drawn to the bottom of the screen, where for the first time previously-read messages stood out beneath the bold-type unread ones.  There was something powerfully sentimental, almost tangible, about the realization that his dad had sat before a computer somewhere ten years earlier and had clicked on these same messages.  The most recent one, received just hours before his parents’ death, was from his mom with the subject line, “re: Li’l Ryan’s Bday”. With a lump developing in his throat, he clicked on the message.  His mom had written: “That’s something dads should talk to their sons about ;)”  Hmm.  Didn’t make sense without context. Below the end of the message he found the option to “show quoted text,”  which he clicked on to reveal the entire exchange in reverse chronological order.  She had been responding to his dad’s message: “I’m sure he’ll get it.  I like the idea, but you better be prepared to have a discussion about the birds and bees.  You know how his mind works.  He’ll want to know how that baby got in there.” Ryan’s palms grew sweaty as he began to infer what was coming next.  Not entirely sure he wanted to continue, but certain he couldn’t stop, he scrolled to the end. The thread had started with his mother’s message, “I’m already showing big-time.  Sweaters only get so baggy, and it’s going to be warming up soon.  I think tonight would be the perfect time to tell Ryan.  I wrapped up a T-shirt for him in one of his presents that says ‘Big Brother’ on it.  A birthday surprise!  You think he’ll get it?” Having trouble taking in a deep breath, he rose to a stand and slowly backed away from his computer.  It wasn’t his nature to ask fate “Why?” or to dwell on whether or not something was “fair.”  But this was utterly overwhelming – a knife wound on top of an old scar that had never sufficiently healed. ~~~ Corbett Hermanson peered around the edge of Bradford’s half-open door and knocked gently on the frame.  Bradford was sitting at his desk, leafing through a thick binder.  He had to have heard the knock, Corbett thought, peeking in, but his attention to the material in the binder remained unbroken. Now regretting his timid first knock, Corbett anxiously debated whether he should knock again, which could be perceived as rude, or try something else to get Bradford’s attention.  Ultimately he decided to clear his throat loudly, while standing more prominently in the doorway. Still, Bradford kept his nose buried in the files in front of him. Finally, Corbett knocked more confidently on the door itself. “What!” Bradford demanded.  “If you’ve got something to say, just say it!” “Sorry, sir.  Wasn’t sure you heard me,” Corbett said, with a nervous chuckle. “Do you think I’m deaf and blind?” Bradford sneered.  “Just get on with it already.” “Well sir, I’m sure you recall our conversation a few days back about the potential unauthorized user in our system?  It turns out...” “Close the door!” Bradford whispered emphatically, waving his arms wildly for Corbett to stop talking and come all the way into his office. “Sorry, sir,” Corbett said, his cheeks glowing an orange-red hue to match his hair.  After self-consciously closing the door behind him, he picked up where he’d left off.  “It turns out, he’s quite good at keeping himself hidden.  I was right about his not being in Indiana, but behind that location, his IP address bounces

In fact, without believable and interesting characters, you don’t really have fiction at all. You may have names walking through plot, but without the essential animation of character, a historical novel becomes mostly a history text, a mystery becomes a police report, and science fiction becomes a speculative monograph. Literary fiction simply becomes unread. Character

I covered her with her blanket and got her a coffee. I plugged in her phone, made her eat half of a tuna sandwich. Family began to show up and they huddled around the waiting room, whispering and crying. Brandon’s mom prayed in Spanish over a rosary. I sat next to Sloan, feigning emotion, doing all the motions. Looking somber and rubbing her back but feeling empty and removed because my crisis response was still in effect. Now that the rush was gone, the velociraptor paced. I couldn’t shut off my brain and the need to be doing something. But the only thing to do was wait. I bounced my knee and picked at my cuticles until they bled. I texted Josh and kept him posted. They’d found a replacement for him at work, but he couldn’t leave until 8:00 p.m. Then, ten hours after the accident, the doctor came out. Sloan bolted from her chair and I followed, ready to absorb what he said with an accuracy that I would be able to transpose onto paper, word for word, two days later. Brandon’s mom wrapped her sweater tighter around herself and stood shoulder to shoulder with Sloan. Brandon’s dad put an arm around his wife. I tried to figure out the outcome from the doctor’s lined, angular face, but he was unreadable. “I’m Dr. Campbell, the resident neurosurgeon. Brandon is out of surgery. He’s stable. We were able to stop the internal bleeding. I had to remove a large piece of his skull to alleviate the pressure on his brain.” Sloan gasped and started sobbing again. I put an arm around her, sandwiching her between Brandon’s mom and me as she breathed into her hands. The doctor went on. “The good news is there’s brain activity. Now, I can’t say what his recovery is going to look like at this juncture, but the tests we ran were promising. He’s going to have a long road ahead of him, but I’m feeling optimistic.” The room took a collective deep breath.

There are eighteen notifications. Thirteen unread texts. Five missed calls.

Tradition. It is the root of who we are, the link to our heritage, the reminder that we as a people, if not individually, will span the ages. To many people and many societies, tradition is the source of structure and of law, the abiding fact of identity that denies the contrary claims of the outlaw, or the misbehavior of the rogue. It is that echoing sound deep in our hearts and our minds and our souls that reminds us of who we are by reinforcing who we were. To many it is even more than the law; it is the religion, guiding faith as it guides morality and society. To many, tradition is a god itself, the ancient rituals and holy texts, scribbled on unreadable parchments yellowed with age or chiseled into eternal rocks. To many, tradition is all.

Every app is tucked neatly into a folder. He has zero unread texts and one unread email. “You’re a neat freak. Who has one unread email?” “I don’t like clutter,” he says.

I never saw the necessity to attend all those classes, so many days a week, or purchase unreadable texts when so much fiction and poetry waited in the bookstore.