Unwritten Quotes

There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

What's in a fairytale? Shadows and light, good and true, vile and ugly, frightening and comforting, heroes and heroines who know that belief in their own magic spurs them on. It is their own faith and courage as they reach for an unwritten Destiny that grants their deepest hopes and makes dreams, as if by magic, come true. ~ Suzy Davies

We have an unwritten rule now, Him and me. He lets me live my life as I see fit and in return I say the odd quiet prayer in my head. Our gentleman's agreement works. ~ Anne Griffin

If their social institutions were abhorrent, their unwritten constitution bordered upon the absurd. The absolutist monarchs of the ancient kingdoms of Amara looked with detestation at the Shazarian constitutional monarchy. Yet this was no time to demonstrate loathing of the upstart nation; condescension could wait until after Sixto had been defeated. ~ A.H. Septimius

What was infinitely more valuable to Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works would probably have remained unwritten. ~ Richard Wagner

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no. ~ Dick Gregory

I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.

In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.

("The Graveyard Reader") ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

I calculated that if I wrote five pages a day, which seemed very doable, I would have an 1,800-page first draft when the deadline rolled around. Though completely unwritten, I was very impressed with how long my first draft would be. ~ Michael Showalter

In prison, I finally got it. Understood that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell. And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools. There would be ceremonies, public apologies, cardboard displays. In the interim, however, I threatened order, threatened civilization. In the interim, I too had to adhere to an unwritten code. ~ H M Naqvi

Stephen's work does not call out to him in this way. It does not speak to him of secrets and stories. He wonders about the woman. He imagines a divorce, something that makes her look away rather than stroke her daughter's hair. To know more about her would be to have some riddle solved. An unwritten novel is in each of us, Woolf would say. ~ Maya Lang

What she thinks and feels is this: This is a world of men. They come into your country, they invade your home, they kill your family. They turn your body into the battlefield - the territory of all violence - all power - all life and death. And we take it. We do. We keep taking it. We have lost track of the reasons we do not slaughter the world of men, but we do not. Yes, there are good men. She sees the face of her father. She sees how the filmmaker loves the writer. She sees the yet-unwritten life of the writer's son. She sees her. brother. Beautiful smear. But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. Cannot be done with them. Cannot exile them into oblivion. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Your heart you should listen,
It speaks the unwritten
Of an idea about to be risen. ~ Maridany

Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book. ~ Naomi Novik

The Hoodmen are far from being the worst of the servants of the Cult of the Unwritten Book, but they are among the most peculiar. You know when you're trying to remember a word and it's on the tip of your tongue but you can't seem to get it out? Well, that's because the Hoodmen have eaten it. They eat all the words that are on the tips of other people's tongues. They thrive on misplaced words, savoring all the lost potential of each expression. They're also able to convert words into electricity. Mr. Steele took an entire phrase. ~ Grant Morrison

The laws of the jungle remind me of the laws of the street. When I came abroad, I had to learn a different set of laws. Everywhere we go there is a different set of laws. Most of them unwritten. ~ Heidi Heilig

New Haven cultivates ... an open gloom that seems happy to acknowledge disrepair and the superfluity of appearance ... I realized that what cramped the town was the weight of unwritten volumes: they scored lines of unfinished writing on every second face that walked the streets ... ~ Sara Suleri

I broke the first rule, the unwritten one, meant not just for warriors but all of us: I took love and used it as a balm to soothe my ego. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

What you have done to this point cannot be undone. What you do next ... It is still unwritten. ~ Mitch Albom

Even then, retailers learned early that shoppers prefer their shopping suggestions not be too truthful. One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a "personal shopper" program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers' desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. ~ John Scalzi

If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry. ~ Kahlil Gibran

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene. ~ Kristen Henderson

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion. ~ Carrie Chapman Catt

After those four years, he returned to the Midwest. He'd turned twenty-five, the Age of Unfolding, and it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book's very first one, and its last unwritten one, and ever sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him. ~ Chad Harbach

I had read history too closely, read of Caesar and the Roman Empire. I had not noticed that in the books there were white spaces between each line; the white spaces are there to remind you of the unspoken, unwritten truth. When one only reads the words and does not read what is not written in the book, then one will never learn to understand. ~ Erik Christian Haugaard

In this delicate and unpredictable life, the future is unwritten. Do not take someone for granted today, for once tomorrow dawns upon the indigo night the only remaining trace will be tracks in the sand... ~ Virginia Alison

After misery follow, or are at least promised to in the unwritten manuscripts of Gods, great things. Sometimes, that great thing can be death. ~ Nina -

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face! ~ George Eliot

Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it. ~ Terry Pratchett

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe - I have tried it - my own feet have tried it well - be not detain'd!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen'd!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn'd!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live? ~ Walt Whitman

When it came to dealing with feral dissidents, there was only one unwritten law that superseded all others: "An' it secure a conviction, do what thou wilt. ~ H.M. Forester

'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment. ~ Richard Dawkins

The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It's not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok's car batteries ... Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil's tip bursts with expression - squiggles, figures, words - filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil's footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil's next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it's laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white. ~ Adam Johnson

Homer tucks in his unwritten words for the night as ocean muses seduce his dreams with swelling songs heard in search of undiscovered paladins. ~ J.D. Tulloch

A story unwritten is without beginning or end. But in its potential lies another story; and in the heartbeat before pen meets page, both stories exist at once, reflecting endless permutations of the other, before one of them disappears forever. ~ Nenia Campbell

The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded. ~ Carl Jung

The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, 'I'll get around to that tomorrow.' One day, however, their tomorrows ran out. ~ Todd Henry

My Caroline,
If you're reading this endnote then I can assume you've suffered your way through the story, our story once again. I suppose having you relive our time together is the ultimate proof of my sadism, as if you of all people needed further proof.
At the end I find myself surprised by how easy it was to write this book about us. I found I missed you so much that a terrible vacuum had formed; all the words came and filled it and for a little while you were home with me again. I didn't want it to end but a story must have an end, I suppose.
I have no secrets to reveal on this final page. I loved you. At least I tried to. And I failed you. I failed you with great success. Forgive me if you can. I will not apologize anymore.
I'm done writing now. I may go into the garden and read until evening. It isn't quite the same without your head on my knee and your ill-informed criticisms of my reading material, but I shall carry on alone, page by page, until the end. And when evening comes and the sun is sitting on the edge of the earth, I will look out, searching for a break in the horizon as that father did once so many thousands of years ago…the father waiting for his prodigal child to return.
I hope you are happy. As for me, I…continue. If you ever miss me, miss… But some things are best left unwritten. Just know I have kept your room for you. I'll say no more. I know I sent you away. I know it was the right thing to do. But I also know that perhaps no ~ Tiffany Reisz

For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war.
[Funeral Oration of Pericles] ~ Thucydides

There is a misleading, unwritten rule that states if a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, then it must be good advice. ~ Bo Bennett

I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn. ~ Tom Stoppard

Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please. ~ Katandra Jackson Nunnally

Every book Runit hadn't written haunted him, so he understood about the mental takeover from the craft of writing. Those unwritten books, locked inside a writer's head, make an inescapable noise, like murmurs from conversation one can't quite make out blended loudly with paper pages blowing in a disturbing wind. ~ Brandt Legg

I believe that life is written out for you, it maps out your life to make you happy, but what I've been living for the past four years is my unwritten life... ~ Amy Shannon

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Again, what if you and I are meant to break all of the unwritten and written rules? ~ Anne Eliot

The best is oftentimes the enemy of the good; and many a good book has remained unwritten ... because there floated before the mind's eye the ideal of a better or a best. ~ Richard Chenevix Trench

Many are the lives of men unwritten, which have nevertheless as powerfully influenced civilization and progress as the more fortunate Great whose names are recorded in biography. Even the humblest person, who sets before his fellows an example of industry, sobriety, and upright honesty of purpose in life, has a present as well as a future influence upon the well-being of his country; for his life and character pass unconsciously into the lives of others, and propagate good example for all time to come. ~ Samuel Smiles

Because we never finished what we started, because it never was allowed to reach a natural close, our ending felt unwritten. I imagined other endings and how they would have defined me, and because I couldn't explore such endings with her, my desire ran loose where it could. I responded to the desire of others, and I fell easily for those who responded to the desire in me. At times I felt worn thin, but it was exciting, and as I found out, rare to be a person who enjoyed both giving and receiving pleasure, who was interested in the erotic as an exchange. Some people couldn't see past the sex, some people fell fast and hard, and though I was generous with my body, I was careful and particular about women I shared my heart with, and that left me lonely. ~ Saskia Vogel

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper. A little beef and bingo at the Nugents'. ~ Adam Rapp

It's an unwritten rule - girl friends' boyfriends are off limits, even after they break up. ~ Kristin Cavallari

The greatest unwritten law of the supernatural set was that one simply didn't steal someone else's human. ~ Gail Carriger

I've become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I'm able to, then perhaps I'll be closer to portraying a true expression of love. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply. ~ Gustave Eiffel

If you are a success in life, there are places you must go and pay to be humiliated. It is an unwritten law that human beings must be tormented throughout their lives in one way or another. If you are fortunate enough to have risen to a social level where no one does it to you for free, then you must pay for the service. ~ Jonathan Carroll

I don't have a diary, I don't write things into a diary. I imprint myself into the sky and when the sunlight shines brightly, I can stand under the sun's rays and everything I have imprinted of myself into the sky, I will begin to see again, feel again, remember. And when the wind begins to blow, it blows the details over my face, and I remember everything I left in the sky and see new things being born. I am unwritten. ~ C. JoyBell C.

You spend hours wrestling with yourself, trying to keep your vision intact, your intensity undiminished. Sometimes I have to stick my head under the tap to get my wits back. And for what? You know what publishing is like these days. Paper costs going up all the time. Nothing gets printed unless it can be made into a movie. Everything is media. Crooked politicians sell their unwritten memoirs for thousands. I've got a great idea for a novel. It's about a giant shark who's possessed by a demon while swimming in the Bermuda Triangle. And the demon talks in CB lingo, see? There'll be recipes in the back. ~ David Sedaris

The universe may forget us, but our light will brighten the darkness for eons after we've departed this world. The universe may forget us, but it can't forget us until we're gone, and we're still here, our futures still unwritten.

We can choose to sit on our asses and wait for the end, or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd, bullshit lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

Education Is An Attempt To Discover Unwritten Laws That Governs The Earth ~ Sunday Adelaja

Losers break the rules. There's no point in obeying them because if you obey the unwritten rules of civility, you're going to lose anyway. So why not just do what you can?' - Zachary Karabell ~ David Pietrusza

He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For ~ George Eliot

Everyone bowed to that unwritten law of family life which ordains that, in the long run, everyone submerges his personal preference in the effort to conform to that of the member of the circle who complains most loudly and is most difficult to satisfy. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

When there's a fire in the country, everyone shows up. It's an unwritten rule, a universal rural truth. Helping neighbors fight fire on their land is the ultimate show of support and goodwill, not to mention a clear acknowledgement that prairie fires are no respecters of persons or fence lines and can quickly jump from ranch to ranch, taking nutritive grass, animals, and structures along with it. Plus, while it's probably only a small part, it's an excuse for a bunch of men to get together and, well, fight fire…to gather around a huge inferno and start up the sprayers…to drive around and extinguish flames…to light backfires and try to anticipate changes in the direction of the wind. Men, whether they admit it or not, thrive on that kind of thing. ~ Ree Drummond

Wisdom is the ability to read the unwritten. ~ Eric Onyango Otieno

Let us agree here today to adopt among ourselves a simple and unwritten rule. We will not rise to criticize someone else's idea unless we are prepared to offer an alternative idea of our own. ~ Marco Rubio

Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself in order to give voice to what is outside him, two paths open: either write a book that could be the unique book, that exhausts the whole in its pages; or write all books, to pursue the whole through its partial images. The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total world revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that writing of all books, writing the books of all possible authors.

If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write. ~ Italo Calvino

One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the consummate ability with which Southern influence, Southern ideas and Southern ideals, have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered over the brain and sinew of this nation. ~ Anna Julia Cooper

It is true, indeed, that the account Plato gives in 'Timaeus' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teachings.' ~ Aristotle.

Light, or something like light, reflected off it onto Ronan's chin and cheeks, rendering him stark and handsome and terrifying and someone else. Then he blew on it. His breath passed through the word, the mirror, the unwritten line.
Adam heard a whisper in his ear. Something moved and stirred inside him. Ronan's eyelashes fluttered darkly.
What are we doing - ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten. ~ Rob Sheffield

He cleared his throat, very carefully, to bring the stillness to a more bearable level without breaking the unwritten rule that governs both churches and freshly fallen blankets of snow. ~ Anna Mattaar

I'm not the color of my skin. I'm a story. One with a past and a future unwritten. ~ Heidi W. Durrow

Imagine going to work every day to do only and exactly what you love!! All the work gets done because of the abundant diversity of your team. Different skills, interests and talents are woven together into a whole that is much greater than the sum of the parts! ~ Denise Moreland

The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror. ~ Bruce Sterling

Until the day we die, our lives are unwritten, which is sometimes a terrifying thought. ~ Emily Haines

For so long now I have waited to get back to baseline and I have to go to exactly the same point from which I originally set out on these travels. My criterion for healing was to be able to go right where I left off, like midpage in a novel. I have aited and waited, but I'm still not back to that page. Kay and Lew try to tell me, in their own gentle ways, to stop waiting. I think they're trying to tell me that i'm never going to get that page. That I'm in an entirely new book now, most of it unwritten ~ Martha Manning

What is written cannot be unwritten, what is said cannot be unsaid. What is remembered can be a vision; Fate can be unwoven by pulling a single thread. ~ Aja James

You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best - the sun to warm and the rain to nourish - to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. 48 "In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you." THE WORLD IS NOT A STAGE ~ Eugene H. Peterson

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it. ~ Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

My God. Is there some unwritten law that you guys have to be giants? (Amanda)
What can I say? Artemis likes her Dark-Hunters tall. Short men need not apply. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen ... ~ Terry Pratchett

Of the doctrines and injunctions kept by the Church, some we have from instruction. But some we have received, from Apostolic Tradition, by succession in private [i.e., unwritten tradition]. Both the former and the latter have one and the same force for piety, and this will be contradicted by no one who has ever so little knowledge in the ordinances of the Church; for were we to dare to reject unwritten customs, as if they had no great importance, we should insensibly mutilate the Gospel, even in the most essential points, or, rather, for the teaching of the Apostles leave but an empty name.17 ~ Andrew Stephen Damick

Those who can bear to observe only unwritten laws-they all head for the taiga. ~ Sylvain Tesson

There are certain unwritten rules in high school. High on the list, close to the top, is one that says. 'Thou shalt not have sex with your best friend's girl'. - A simple rule, understood by all. - Danny Carrs totally ignored it.
Another rule even higher on the list says: 'Thou shalt not beat the crap out of the star quarterback two days before the play-off game.' I sort of ignored that one. I figured it made us even. Needless to say, the jerks at school didn't see it my way. ~ G.L. Snodgrass

It is an unwritten rule of life that when you are in acute pain and have no one to console you, someone, from somewhere, will emerge in your life to offer you comfort. However, 'that' someone will vanish from the scene once you begin to regain grip on your life, leaving you with another sense of loss to nurse. ~ Hari Parameshwar

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories. ~ Nicholas Ostler

The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians. ~ Shirley Chisholm

It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of these sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. ~ Chad Harbach

For those of us in the political business, generally, it's been pretty much an unwritten but understood rule that family and children are out of bounds, that you don't attack someone's family. ~ Michael Nutter

Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself. ...the most important consideration concerns that which transcends the city or which is higher than the city; it does not concern things which are simply subordinate to the city. ~ Leo Strauss

I'd trapped myself in a script ... But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten. ~ David James Duncan

I'm rather relaxed about death. From quite an early age I've regarded it as part of the deal, the unwritten guarantee that comes with your birth certificate. ~ Bob Monkhouse

when you spend
all your time
imagining yourself
in other people's shoes,

your own story
goes unwritten,

& there is nothing
more painful
than that. ~ Amanda Lovelace

Weary of all who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island.

The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!

I come upon the tracks of deer in the snow.
Language but no words. ~ Tomas Transtromer

Friendship intimacy calls for whoever is on the receiving end of the information to offer "hefty helpings of emotional expressiveness and unconditional support." Yet, as Karbo points out, they can't be too opinionated. So if I'm enraged that Matt canceled our Friday night plans, again, she better huff and puff and agree it was lame of him, but she would never say "He's such an ass, I've never liked him." Such are the unwritten rules of friendship. ~ Rachel Bertsche

It's an unwritten rule that best friends take care of each other, and best friends' husbands understand. ~ Liz Fenton

Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end- of anything. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Love is in the hunger between the unwritten lyrics.
It is the meeting where time trembles,
it is then that poetry comes in search of you both... ~ Jayita Bhattacharjee

A character in a writer's head, unwritten,remains a possession; his thoughts recur to it constantly, and while his imagination gradually enriches it, he enjoys the singular pleasure of feeling that there, in his mind, someone is living a varied and tremulous life, obedient to his fancies. - W.Somerset Maugham ~ Chandana Roy