Unsaid Quotes

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Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.
Langston Hughes (The Collected Poems)
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.
Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
Words can break someone into a million pieces, but they can also put them back together. I hope you use yours for good, because the only words you'll regret more than the ones left unsaid are the ones you use to intentionally hurt someone.
Taylor Swift
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
Winston S. Churchill
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Benjamin Franklin
The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.
Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You)
‎True love isn't expressed in passionately whispered words an intimate kiss or a embrace; before two people are married, love is expressed in self-control, patience, even words left unsaid.
Joshua Harris
Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.
Jonathan Harnisch (Freak)
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (Little Foxes; or, The Insignificant Little Habits Which Mar Domestic Happiness)
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
Albert Camus
I didn’t ask. Some things are better left unsaid. He looked at me and I shivered. I never get enough of him. Never will. He lives. I breathe. I want. Him. Always. Fire to my ice. Ice to my fever. Later we would go to bed, and when he rose over me, dark and vast and eternal, I’d know joy.
Karen Marie Moning (Shadowfever (Fever, #5))
When Great Trees Fall When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
Women often seemed to leave things unsaid, and in his limited experience it was what they did not say that proved the most trouble.
Robert Jordan (The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, #2))
Life is classified. There is always so much that goes unsaid.
Ally Carter (Out of Sight, Out of Time (Gallagher Girls, #5))
Don't leave it all unsaid, somewhere in the wasteland of your head.
Morrissey
I don't have to tell you it goes without saying there are some things better left unsaid. I think that speaks for itself. The less said about it the better.
George Carlin (Brain Droppings)
He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears.
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3))
We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.
Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake)
Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.
Philippa Gregory (The Constant Princess (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #6))
He'd fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Gods of Jade and Shadow)
Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left unsaid.
Bob Dylan
I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has.
Stephen Dunn (Different Hours)
I answer her with my silence, understanding the full power of it for the first time. Words are weapons. Weapons are powerful. So are unsaid words. So are unused weapons.
Emily Murdoch (If You Find Me)
I made it," you said, gruffly, "for you." You shoved it onto my finger. It was roughly carved, shaped from a lump of something colourful and cold...a ring made entirely from a gemstone. It was beautiful. It glinted emerald greens and blood reds over my skin, and had tiny flecks of gold catching the light. I couldn't stop staring at it. "Why?" I asked. You didn't answer that. Instead you touched the ring gently and looked piercingly at me, unsaid questions in your eyes.
Lucy Christopher (Stolen (Stolen, #1))
It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.
Frederick Buechner (Godric)
If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. This ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.
Sally Rooney (Normal People)
There is no time to leave important words unsaid.
Paulo Coelho
The unsaid, for me, exerts great power...
Louise Glück
The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you.
Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You)
This love is worth the unsaid truths. The hidden lies.
Alessandra Torre (Black Lies)
Maybe we should have gone with him," he said, a few minutes after his friend was lost to sight. "Three of us would make four times the noise he will," Halt said. Horace frowned, not quite understanding the equation. "Wouldn't three of us make three times the noise?" Halt shook his head. "Will and Tug will make hardly any noise. Neither will Abelard and I. But as for you and that moving earthquake you call a horse..." He gestured at Kicker and left the rest unsaid.
John Flanagan (Halt's Peril (Ranger's Apprentice, #9))
What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration.
Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist: Essays)
Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths... I doubt that such pain makes us "better"; but I know it makes us more profound... In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
And things go unsaid soon get forgotten
Malorie Blackman (Noughts & Crosses (Noughts & Crosses, #1))
I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
Harold Pinter
Wanting to Die Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic. In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole. I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don't always die, but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison. Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
Anne Sexton
Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable
Stephen Dunn (Different Hours)
I'm talking about the ones who, for whatever reason, are as much a part of you as your own soul. Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless. If you had a lifetime to talk, there would still be things left unsaid.
Sara Zarr (Sweethearts)
Some things need to be left unsaid.
Simone Elkeles (Wild Cards (Wild Cards, #1))
I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.
Anna Kamieńska
If we all spoke the truth there would be a great deal of unhappiness in the world, and particularly at such a time. Some things are better left unsaid.
Amanda Grange (Mr. Darcy's Diary (Jane Austen Heroes, #1))
There's a power that comes with silence. I had grown to fear the unsaid thing. So it felt like a release to say it-to admit that the risk wasn't just inside our walls-it was inside my skin. I was willing to claw, scratch, and bleed until I'd found it.
Ally Carter (Out of Sight, Out of Time (Gallagher Girls, #5))
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Dorothy Nevill
It seems an age ago, since you have left me, time has filled me, with words unsaid; as the sadness seeps into me slowly, and I am left to face the night ahead.
Lang Leav (Memories)
He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs...
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3))
The air between them filled with all that remained unsaid. All that should be said. Yet wasn't.
Renée Ahdieh (Flame in the Mist (Flame in the Mist, #1))
And if I want to leave here without regrets, I need to know there are no more unsaid words left to haunt me. --Josh
Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.
Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
Between giving up and holding on Between initiation and rejection Between the saids and unsaids Between the understood and miss-understood Between Life's priorities We lost each other.
Wordions
You never know how long you have-there might not BE a later-so don't let things go unsaid or unforgiven.
Dawn Metcalf (Luminous)
Here are the things I want for you - I want you to be happy. I want someone else to know the warmth of your smile, to feel the way I did when I was in your presence. I want you to know how happy you once made me and though you really did hurt me, in the end, I was better for it. I don't know if what we had was love, but if it wasn't, I hope to never fall in love. Because of you, I know I am too fragile to bear it. I want you to remember my lips beneath your fingers and how you told me things you never told another soul. I want you to know that I have kept sacred, everything you had entrusted in me and I always will. Finally, I want you to know how sorry I am for pushing you away when I had only meant to bring you closer. And if I ever felt like home to you, it was because you were safe with me. - I want you to know that most of all.
Lang Leav (Lullabies (Volume 2) (Lang Leav))
Montalbano felt moved. This was real friendship, Sicilian friendship, the kind based on intuition, on what was left unsaid. With a true friend, one never needs to ask, because the other understands on his own accordingly.
Andrea Camilleri (The Snack Thief (Inspector Montalbano, #3))
If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.
Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
These things he said in words. But much in his heart remained unsaid. For he himself could not speak his deeper secret.
Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.
Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the most tempting moment.
Dorothy Neville-Rolfe
This is a story about survival. Letting go and learning to let in. Getting along and moving on. The truth about life. The things left unsaid...
Nadège Richards (5 Miles (Breathe, #1))
Love is where unseen and unsaid things merge with each other where silence is thirsty of happenings
Seema Gupta
Why do you keep coming?" she asked. "Because," he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because, once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children's psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. "Because," he repeated.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
It never dawned on us that life is unpredictable, that one day, one of us could suddenly cease to exist and what then? What would be the joy in having left so much unsaid? With what memories would we fill the empty silence?
Isabel Lopez (Isabel's Hand-Me-Down Dreams)
We can't talk about it, or I know she won't so I don't even try, but it's what goes unsaid between people tat builds up like masonry. You have to either knock the bricks out with other things, or let them keep stacking until eventually you are alone in a room.
Justin Taylor
A plan is a thing that goes unsaid, but puts the hope in your voice nonetheless.
David Levithan (Two Boys Kissing)
So much harm comes into this world when the wrong thing is said. But that's nothing compared to the pain from what goes unsaid.
Brad Meltzer (The Book of Lies)
Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.
Homer
She wished such words unsaid with all her heart
Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.
Amanda Peters (The Berry Pickers)
After the temper subsides and one has a moment to calmly reflect, it isn't uncommon for declarations shouted in a fit of rage to strike one as untrue, and because they may have been hurtful to family, friends, lovers, husbands, or wives, one wishes them unsaid.
Frank Beddor (The Looking Glass Wars (The Looking Glass Wars, #1))
There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard. Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.
Jeanette Winterson (Lighthousekeeping)
The idea that if a thing went unsaid, it didn’t really exist, because words had power, words gave weight and shape and force, and the withholding of them could keep a thing from being real,
Victoria E. Schwab (Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity, #2))
The penny dropped. I sat in my room and burst into tears. Our band had barely begun, and already our drummer and bass player were a couple of drug fiends!
Tom Fletcher (McFly: Unsaid Things... Our Story)
What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)
Even though love covers all things, fear is what keeps us silent and keeps words unsaid. Fear keeps us standing in one place. Eventually, when it wins, it means we never got the courage to say what we needed to say.
Hannah Brencher (If You Find This Letter: My Journey to Find Purpose Through Hundreds of Letters to Strangers)
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. ... Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. ...
A.W. Tozer
who did I think we were. who did I think I could make you. this is the oldest mistake, to confuse wanting with magic. silence is the undoing of every spell, and we are experts in the unsaid. even now, I forget to put us in past tense. as if the air in this city were the same. as if love is anything like its speaking.
Marty McConnell Emily Kagan Trenchard
It had always been the laughter that needled through me, a repeated stitch that surfaced over and over again.....Laughter reveals in the same way a sigh or a glance does. It's an unintentional language. Worry, fear, deceit - they hide in the things unsaid.
Mary E. Pearson (Dance of Thieves (Dance of Thieves, #1))
There is a moment that comes into every life when the right word, the right look even, could change the shape of the world forever. The wrong one could as well, though the resulting shape would be different. No word at all, however, and the moment slips by, and things remain unsaid that perhaps should have been said, perhaps shouldn't, and no one can ever know for sure.
Anne Elisabeth Stengl (Moonblood (Tales of Goldstone Wood, #3))
…And you’re acting like I should be able to read something in your silence. The problem is that speech needs periods of silence to be intelligible, to separate the words and keep it from being a steady drone of noise. To frame it. The opposite is true. To find the meaning in what’s left unsaid, we need words to punctuate it.
Wildbow (Worm (Parahumans, #1))
The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines.
David Whyte
Why, isabel? Why are you doing this to yourself? To your body?' And why are you doing this to me? is the awful, selfish thought that is left unsaid. 'Because I can,' she answers, and I shiver as she unconsciously echoes chastity-ruth. 'But-' 'Because it's my body,' she cuts in. 'Isn't it?
Louise O'Neill (Only Ever Yours)
You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to. That’s what your heart is there for.
Nora McInerny (No Happy Endings)
I’m barely human. I’m more like a creature; to me, everything gives off a scent! Thoughts, moments, feelings, movements, words left unsaid, words barely spoken; they all have a distinct sense, distinct fragrances! Both a smell and a touch! To inhale is to capture, to experience! I can perceive and I can “touch” in so many odd ways! And so I am made up of all these scents, all these feelings! An illumination of nerve endings!
C. JoyBell C.
Zhi yin. Jem had told her once that it meant understanding music, and also a bond that went deeper than friendship. Jem played, and he played the years of Will's life as he had seen them. He played two little boys in the training room, one showing the other how to throw knives, and he played the ritual of parabatai: the fire and the vows and burning runes. He played two young men running through the streets of London in the dark, stopping to lean up against a wall and laugh together. He played the day in the library when he and Will had jested with Tessa about ducks, and he played the train to Yorkshire on which Jem had said that parabatai were meant to love each other as they loved their own souls. He played that love, and he played their love for Tessa, and hers for them, and he played Will saying, In your eyes I have always found grace. He played the too few times he had seen them since he had joined the Brotherhood- the brief meetings at the Institute; the time when Will had been bitten by a Shax demon and nearly died, and Jem had come from the Silent City and sat with him all night, risking discovery and punishment. And he played the birth of their first son, and the protection ceremony that had been carried out on the child in the Silent City. Will would have no other Silent Brother but Jem perform it. And Jem played the way he had covered his scarred face with his hands and turned away when he'd found out the child's name was James. He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears. Jem set down his bow, and came toward the bed, drawing back his hood, so she could see his closed eyes and his scarred face. And he had sat down beside them on the bed, and taken Will's hand, the one that Tessa was not holding, and both Will and Tessa heard Jem's voice in their minds. I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace. Will had opened the blue eyes that had never lost their color over all the passing years, and looked at Jem and then Tessa, and smiled, and died, with Tessa's head on his shoulder and his hand in Jem's.
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3))
The unsaid thing about funerals is that directly after the communal mourning for someone you love, after everyone is gone and the connected grief dispersed, comes a solitude beyond imagining. A great, gaping nothing where a whole person and life and future used to be. The other side of a funeral is abyss.
Tracy Deonn (Bloodmarked (The Legendborn Cycle, #2))
I think about how there are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark. I don’t mean the usual faint impression: he was cute, she was nice, they made me laugh, I wish I’d known her better, I remember the time she threw up in class. And I don’t just mean that they change you. A lot of people can change you – the first kid who called you a name, the first teacher who said you were smart., the first person who crowned you best friend. It’s the change you remember, the firsts and what they meant, not really the people. Ethan changed me, for instance, but the longer we are apart the more he sort of recedes into the distance as a real person and in his place is a cardboard cutout that says first boyfriend. I’m talking about the ones who, for whatever reason are a part of you as your own soul. Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. My mom was right about that. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless. If you had a lifetime to talk, there would still be things left unsaid.
Sara Zarr (Sweethearts)
Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered. It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.
Robert Goolrick (A Reliable Wife)
Vadim smiled. “I’m not meeting him. We’ll be friends.” Dan still didn’t say anything, just nodded, the smile still there, then turned and walked through the living room and onto the patio, all the way through the French windows. Looking out over the old orchard and the mountains when Vadim got to his side, reaching over to take Dan’s hand. Worth it. A thousand times. Any sacrifice, from the small ones to the big ones, and Dan turns his head, looking fully at him, while the smile grew. He didn’t need to say anything, didn’t have to voice the “I love you”. It was there, unsaid, yet outspoken. Fourteen years, they didn’t come cheap.
Aleksandr Voinov (Special Forces - Veterans (Special Forces, #3))
Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one?
Dougie Poynter (McFly: Unsaid Things... Our Story)
To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can't separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes" (The Way of Jesus, Eugene H. Peterson, 22).
Eugene H. Peterson
When there was but a gray speck of his heart left, he bend down and kissed her again, briefly, a brush of lips. A grain of dust may contain a universe, and it was the same for him. Within that gray speck there lived his love and he gave it to Casiopea, for her to see. He'd fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams. He had imagined himself a man for her, and he allowed her to see the extant of this man, and he gave her this speck of heart, which was a man, to hold for a moment before taking it back the second before it faded.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Gods of Jade and Shadow)
Possibilities I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here to many things I've also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.
Wisława Szymborska
You said before that you were tired. Well, I’m tired, too. Tired of letting everything stay unsaid. We spend all our time together, and we do it because we want to, right? And I guess I think a lot about that, and about us. And about … well, more. Us having more. It’s not about lust or sex or whatever you want to call it. I mean, some of it is that. But mostly it’s about belonging. When I’m with you, I belong. It just naturally felt like that. And I think it felt like that for you. But I don’t know where that leaves us, or even what that is. I’m just tired of trying to figure it out myself. I need the other half of the equation.
David Levithan (Six Earlier Days (Every Day, #0.5))
We were halfway through our first joint when we heard Tom's footsteps coming down the stairs. 'Shhhh... Shhhh!' The footsteps approached my door. Silence. And then a piece of A4 paper appeared under my door. Neither of us said a word as I crept over and picked it up. It was a drawing of two stick men, each with a massive joint in their hand. And written underneath were the words 'Rule Breakers'.
Dougie Poynter (McFly: Unsaid Things... Our Story)
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens; the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments; the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page; the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses, for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert; the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self; the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl; the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought; the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands; the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language; the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Octavio Paz
What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an imitation, a thing that is said or unsaid. Sometimes it's who's at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life. But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point-- in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms-- it turns out there are rear-guard actions everywhere. To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me.
Renata Adler (Speedboat)
Her own awareness had risen like the dawn on her back.Like a leaden sunrise veiled in a swirl of storm clouds. It was no longer enough to have answers for Shiva's sake. Indeed, it had ceased to be about mere vengeance the moment Khalid's lips touched hers in the alley by the souk. She had wanted there to be a reason for this madness, needed there to be a reason, so that she could be with him. So that she could be by his side, make him smile as she laughed, weave tales by lamplight, and share secrets in the dark.So that she could fall asleep in his arms and awaken to a brilliant tomorrow. But it was too late. He was the Mehrdad of her nightmares. She had opened the door. She had seen the bodies hanging from the walls, without explanation. Without justification. And without one, Shahrzad knew what must be done. Khalid had to answer for such vile deeds. Such rampant death. Even if he was her air. Even if she loved him beyond words.
Renée Ahdieh (The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn, #1))
Looking back at those early days in the band house, we can all see how important they were in helping us bond as a band. It could have gone so wrong. Danny and I had picked Harry and Dougie after, literally, two days of knowing them. We could have all hated each other. We could have found that we had nothing in common, or that we resented the time we spent with each other. In fact, we had such a lot of fun. We weren’t yet famous or successful, but already we were having the time of our lives. Even when we hit the big time, we didn’t want to go out to clubs or celebrity haunts. Not our scene. For us, the best thing about being in a band was being in a band, doing band stuff - not all the trappings that went with it. We liked working on our music, and we liked hanging out together. All this meant we gelled more than most bands ever have the opportunity or inclination to do. Within a couple of months of moving into the band house, I had three new best friends. Their names were Danny, Harry and Dougie. No matter what the future held for us, our friendship was something we now know we could always rely on.
Tom Fletcher (McFly: Unsaid Things... Our Story)
You speak as if you envied him." "And I do envy him, Emma. In one respect he is the object of my envy." Emma could say no more. They seemed to be within half a sentence of Harriet, and her immediate feeling was to avert the subject, if possible. She made her plan; she would speak of something totally different—the children in Brunswick Square; and she only waited for breath to begin, when Mr. Knightley startled her, by saying, "You will not ask me what is the point of envy.—You are determined, I see, to have no curiosity.—You are wise—but I cannot be wise. Emma, I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment." "Oh! then, don't speak it, don't speak it," she eagerly cried. "Take a little time, consider, do not commit yourself." "Thank you," said he, in an accent of deep mortification, and not another syllable followed. Emma could not bear to give him pain. He was wishing to confide in her—perhaps to consult her;—cost her what it would, she would listen. She might assist his resolution, or reconcile him to it; she might give just praise to Harriet, or, by representing to him his own independence, relieve him from that state of indecision, which must be more intolerable than any alternative to such a mind as his.—They had reached the house. "You are going in, I suppose?" said he. "No,"—replied Emma—quite confirmed by the depressed manner in which he still spoke—"I should like to take another turn. Mr. Perry is not gone." And, after proceeding a few steps, she added—"I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain.—But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend, or to ask my opinion of any thing that you may have in contemplation—as a friend, indeed, you may command me.—I will hear whatever you like. I will tell you exactly what I think." "As a friend!"—repeated Mr. Knightley.—"Emma, that I fear is a word—No, I have no wish—Stay, yes, why should I hesitate?—I have gone too far already for concealment.—Emma, I accept your offer—Extraordinary as it may seem, I accept it, and refer myself to you as a friend.—Tell me, then, have I no chance of ever succeeding?" He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes overpowered her. "My dearest Emma," said he, "for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hour's conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma—tell me at once. Say 'No,' if it is to be said."—She could really say nothing.—"You are silent," he cried, with great animation; "absolutely silent! at present I ask no more." Emma was almost ready to sink under the agitation of this moment. The dread of being awakened from the happiest dream, was perhaps the most prominent feeling. "I cannot make speeches, Emma:" he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing.—"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.—You hear nothing but truth from me.—I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.—Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover.—But you understand me.—Yes, you see, you understand my feelings—and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear, once to hear your voice.
Jane Austen (Emma)
Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise even although I am not wise when they want to reproach you. If you had waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive, and not far from death. I am speaking now only to those of you who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to say to them: You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words - I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words - certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me, and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken them. And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of death, and they, too, go their ways condemned by the truth to suffer the penalty of villainy and wrong; and I must abide by my award - let them abide by theirs. I suppose that these things may be regarded as fated, - and I think that they are well.
Plato (Apology)