The Incommunicable Quotes

Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one ... Vitality never "takes." You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. ~ Andre Breton

And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but it immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' other bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does -- a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or olden or gray or purple or any other shade in between ~ Jose Saramago

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory. ~ Andre Breton

Uh, Miss Carlson," I said, standing at her desk after everybody else had gone on to their next class, "somebody told me you went to that guy's funeral the one the highway patrol shot."
"Yes," SHe said. "I did."
She didn't look like she was mad at me about it. She had real long eyelashes. I bet she was good-looking when she was young.
"Was he a relative or something?" That was what I was afraid of.
"No. Not even a friend really." She paused, like she was hunting for the right words. Finally she said, "I read a book once that ended with the words 'the incommunicable past' You can only share the past with someone who's shared it with you. So I can't explain to you what Mark was to me, exactly. I knew him a long time ago. ~ S.E. Hinton

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls. ~ Richard Flanagan

And although this (marital love) cannot be portrayed artistically, then let your consolation be, as it is mine, that we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it.
Therefore, when I readily admit that romantic love lends itself much better to artistic portrayal than marital love, this does not at all mean that it is less esthetic than the other - on the contrary, it is more esthetic. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition. ~ Northrop Frye

He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us. (p. 70) ~ Rabih Alameddine

If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family. ~ Phil Klay

There are some things which are known only to oneself and one's maker. These are clearly incommunicable. ~ M K Gandhi

It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable. ~ Virginia Woolf

How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other! ~ Charles Baudelaire

By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies- all these are private and except through symbols and at second hand incommunicable. ~ Aldous Huxley

When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me. ~ Ben Lerner

So you see how difficult it is to understand one another, my dear angel, how incommunicable thought is, even between two people in love. ~ Charles Baudelaire