Sayable Quotes & Sayings

We must learn to live in this world, because we have no other choice. What we do have a choice in is how we choose to live. We can remain gray and immobile in the wake of our losses or we can open ourselves up to the world, let the sunshine in, fill our surroundings with heaps of flowers, and know that we loved someone truly and deeply. — Claire Bidwell Smith

If there are words for all the pastels in a hue - the lavenders, mauves, fushsias, plums, and lilacs - who will name the tones and tints of a smell? It's as if we were hypnotized en masse and told to selectively forget. It may be, too, that smells move us so profoundly, in part, because we cannot utter their names. In a world sayable and lush, where marvels offer themselves up readily for verbal dissection, smells are often right on the tip of our tongues - but no closer - and it gives them a kind of magical distance, a mystery, a power without a name, a sacredness. — Diane Ackerman

The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex! DR. STEPHEN T. COLBERT, D.F.A. — Christopher Ryan

You may only call me "Mrs. Darcy" ... when you are completely, and perfectly, and incandescently happy. — Jane Austen

His remorse and better judgment arrived, late as usual, like party guests riding in just after the social disaster of the season has already erupted. — Scott Lynch

Until you have courted the bluebills in the snow, you have not tasted of the purer delights of waterfowling — Gordon MacQuarrie

Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable. — Frederick Busch

I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible. — Joseph O'Neill

And I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all. — Tana French

There are things that are not sayable. That's why we have words. — Amy King

Eva was a between-the-lines talker. She left the sayable unsaid and said what she meant without saying it. — Robert Wilson

The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art. — Charles Simic

I realized, listening to the silences that fell sometimes in my interview groups, that there are things that are sayable and unsayable about motherhood today. It is permissable, for example, to talk a lot about guilt, but not a lot about ambition. You can talk a lot about sex (or its lack) but not about the feelings that are keeping women from sleeping with their husbands. You can talk about society's lack of "appreciation" of mother's and the need for more social validation
but not about policy that might actually make life better. You cannot really challenge the American culture of rugged individualism. — Judith Warner

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men. — Salman Rushdie

Here is the time for the sayable, here
is its home.
Speak and attest. More than ever
the things we can live with are falling
away,
and ousting them, filling their place,
a will with no image.
Will beneath crusts which readily crack
whenever the act inside swells and
seeks new borders. — Rainer Maria Rilke

She wanted once more to extract the last sweet drop from this fleeting pleasure. — Hermann Hesse

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsay able than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. — Rainer Maria Rilke

As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of Dickens acting out everything in front of the mirror as he wrote it down. Later, when you approach his work as an actor, you notice how sayable the dialogue is. — Harry Lloyd

One simple rule: no amnesty, no special pathway to citizenship. — Mitt Romney

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature. — Carlos Fuentes

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds. — P.D. James