Unrecorded Quotes & Sayings

[ ... ] to catch those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex. — Virginia Woolf

I began to see, in the place of emptiness, presence. I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension. — Sharon Butala

An unrecorded goal is only a wish. — Paul R. Timm

I learned that music comes from the voice, the rhythm and the heart of each person, and that the musicality of those unrecorded melodies could lift the curtain of fog, pass through windows and screens to waken us as gently as a morning lullaby. — Kim Thuy

The Enlightenment taught that observation unrecorded was knowledge lost. — Stephen E. Ambrose

I sometimes think about old tombs and weeds
That interwreathe among the bones of kings
With cold and poisonous berry and black flower:
Or ruminate upon the skulls of steeds
Frailer than shells and on those luminous wings -
The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power,
Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grind
Into so wraith-like a translucency
Of tissue-thin and aqueous bone
- A Reverie of Bone — Mervyn Peake

We are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known,
the unrecorded;
we have no map;
possibly we will reach haven,
heaven. — H.D.

Your edict, King, was strong,
But all your strength is weakness itself against
The immortal unrecorded laws of God.
They are not merely now: they were, and shall be,
Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.
I knew I must die, even without your decree:
I am only mortal. And if I must die
Now, before it is my time to die,
Surely this is no hardship: can anyone
Living, as I live, with evil all about me,
Think Death less than a friend? — Sophocles

Blessed are those who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused,'" Gabriel quoted. "One of the unrecorded Beatitudes. — Terri Garey

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore. At — Ryan Hackney

In 1975, the collapse of a cascade of Chinese dams during a flood killed a hundred and seventy-one thousand people, but the event is rarely discussed, and the names of the victims are largely unrecorded today. — Evan Osnos

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment. — Virginia Woolf

I find myself every so often looking at my ground glass as though the unrecorded image might escape me! — Edward Weston

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard. — Barbara Tuchman

My early years, my weakling, teething, vaccination, memoirs of the various nursery maids, I dismiss unrecorded: if the Faculty desire a narrative of this period, I fear I cannot oblige them; it would interest no one else.
One observation however suggests itself; if I was at that time what I am now, what transports of delight I must have received when gathered to the warm full breasts of the woman who bore me I drew from that holy source the rich and essentially feminine fluid which gushing down my throat animated my little frame. — M. Le Compte Du Bouleau

Alexander was laid in state in the city he had founded. A previous imperial visit had not been a complete success; Augustus, passing his hands over the inspirational features of the conqueror's corpse, broke off his nose. Whether it was repaired or the emperor removed it as a relic is unrecorded. — Elizabeth Speller

Those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary. — Djuna Barnes

For four years he lived in Brooklyn, and four years in Brooklyn are a geologic age
a single stratum of grey time. They were years of poverty, of desperation, of loneliness unutterable. All about him were the poor, the outcast, the neglected and forsaken people of America, and he was one of them. But life is strong, and year after year it went on around him in all its manifold complexity, rich with its unnoticed and unrecorded little happenings. — Thomas Wolfe

How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable. — Brewster Kahle

How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? — Douglas A. Blackmon

I've discovered that life doesn't always turn on the obvious things - people dying, marriages, all the stuff that gets carved on the tombstones - but little unrecorded things too. — Eve Chase

Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. — Herman Melville

I did not understand, taking those pictures, that history must be collected while the subject exists. If not, what goes unrecorded can fill an ocean. — Susanna Daniel

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now, entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending: the soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife. — Virginia Woolf

The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. Hew saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the major-domo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle. — Anthony Burgess

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] — Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

Like a forest rose the huge peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens. They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born of the midnight and silent grandeur, born of the great listening hollows of the night, something that lay 'twixt terror and wonder, dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart
and called him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter's night appalled him ...
-The Glamour of the Snow — Algernon Blackwood

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? — Madeleine Thien

His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people? — Alexander McCall Smith

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling — Audre Lorde

No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted word, failure and success and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross
was that a failure. — Frederic Farrar

A writer observes. A writer records for posterity. The moments in the transience of the labyrinth of time that would go unrecorded otherwise! A writer records for value. A writer records for sentimentalism. A writer tries in earnest to carry the emotions and sentiments that make us what we ultimately are. For what are we? Empty spaces in an atom! — Avijeet Das

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

Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded. — Cormac McCarthy

Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is? — Claire Messud

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed. — Iris Chang

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. — Audre Lorde

It is only after an unknown number of unrecorded labors, after a host of noble hearts have succumbed in discouragement, convinced that their cause is lost; it is only then that cause triumphs. — Francois Guizot

There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off. — Iris Murdoch

People represented in book or film travel vast oceans of life unrecorded; studeo time costs money, and pens grow heavy. — Adrian Lamo

If I have to wait, I read; if I wake in the night, I feel along the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head. — Virginia Woolf

The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded. All the sky seemed troubled and night came quickly over the evening land and small gray birds flew crying softly after the fled sun. He chucked up the horse. He passed and so passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness. — Cormac McCarthy

I wish I could remember the first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me;
If bright or dim the season it might be;
Summer or winter for aught I can say.
So, unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was i to see and to forsee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom, yet, for many a May. — Christina Rossetti