Unspecified Quotes & Sayings

Our Narcissistic Mother told us a Big Lie. She told it subliminally if not in actual words. And The Big Lie was this: If we tried hard enough we could win her approval and her love. If we were good enough, or wise enough, or beautiful enough, or that-magical-unspecified-ingredient enough. In other words, if we achieved perfection, she would love us. — Danu Morrigan

Whenever I find myself somehow fooled into doing one of these talks, it's on the grounds that some confused soul thinks that I will talk about the digital world and the future. What always happens is that I rant for an unspecified length of time about obscure history and fringe beliefs. So you need to understand that you are now trapped in this room with me and I've already been paid. This is my cunning plan. — Warren Ellis

How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire. — Rumi

Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting. — Richard Diebenkorn

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers-except the Jewish bankers who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World...and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy American in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly. — Sinclair Lewis

And when she's alone again, as truly alone in the world as she's always felt herself to be, she looks at herself in a bamboo-framed mirror. Beautiful face, aglow with the taste of carnal pleasure, disdainful and avid ... and above all an indefinable look in which can be sensed unspecified danger, sensuality triumphant and a sort of intoxicating vulgarity. She likes what she sees ... around her drifts a great brunette fragrance, scent of happy brunette, in which the idea of others dissolves. — Louis Aragon

In a cross-cultural study of 173 societies (by Herbert Barry and L. M. Paxson of the University of Pittsburgh) 76 societies typically had mother and infant sharing a bed; in 42 societies they shared a room but not a bed; and in the remaining 55 societies they shared a room with a bed unspecified. There were no societies in which infants routinely slept in a separate room. — Melvin Konner

One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes. — Erik Larson

This would be the worst birthday of his life. Vladimir's best friend Baobab was down in Florida covering his rent, doing unspeakable things with unmentionable people. Mother, roused by the meager achievements of Vladimir's first quarter-century, was officially on the warpath. And, in possibly the worst development yet, 1993 was the Year of the Girlfriend. A downcast, heavyset American girlfriend whose bright orange hair was strewn across his Alphabet City hovel as if cadre of Angora rabbits had visited. A girlfriend whose sickly-sweet incense and musky perfume coated Vladimir's unwashed skin, perhaps to remind him of what he could expect on this, the night of his birthday: Sex. Every week, once a week, they had to have sex, as both he and this large pale woman, this Challah, perceived that without weekly sex their relationship would fold up according to some unspecified law of relationships. — Gary Shteyngart

Unspecified." I was amused. "So you have the proverbial horse thief in your — Diana Gabaldon

My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition. — Michael Pollan

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted ... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past. — Gary Shteyngart

Along with the knife I'd been holding in my teeth, and saw you standing alone, looking around the room with big eyes, and I'd never felt so vulnerable. I thought we had a connection. That's why I invited you on a weekday trip to a compound at an unspecified Middle Eastern — Anonymous

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. — Vladimir Nabokov

The United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran. What form our government's intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door. — Sam Harris

Nowhere else in the Constitution does a 'right' attributed to 'the people' refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention 'the people,' the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset ... The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms ... The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it 'shall not be infringed. — Antonin Scalia

To hire someone willing to undertake an unspecified task, likely involving violence. — William Gibson

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time. — Peter Maxwell Davies

However, it has long been known that diazepam and other similar drugs cause falls in the elderly, and such falls are often the precursor of death. It has also been suspected that, by some unspecified mechanism, diazepam (and sleeping draughts of all kinds) promote death. A — Theodore Dalrymple

The cumulative results of the brain's chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression); minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus the level of norepinephrine; minus the level of normetanephrine plus the level of metanepherine, the sum of those divided by the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus an unspecified conversion variable; or, as CTP puts it: "D-type score = C1 (MHPG) - C2 (VMA) + C3 (NE) - C4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C0." The score should come out between one for unipolar and zero for bipolar patients, so if you come up with something else - you're doing it wrong. — Andrew Solomon

They say that's what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country. — Nina LaCour

Nobody should ever mistake and think that our country [USA] is weakened, or that authority is diffuse and unspecified, and that we are vulnerable. — Michael Bloomberg

Nagler-Rolz helicopter (unspecified type) Two types of ultra-light helicopter were designed by Bruno Nagler. Each of these could be strapped to a man's back. The first, for which no designation has been reported, has a single rotor, and a small engine enclosed in a fairing is mounted on an extension of the rotor on the opposite side of the hub. The motor drives a shaft which is housed inside the blade and, in turn, through bevel gearing, drives two small propellers in opposite directions. The propellers are located at the centre of pressure, one at the leading-edge and one at the trailing-edge of the blade. Nagler-Rolz NR — Walter Meyer

Well, I don't know. When I signed my contract, I signed to play Loki in five more Marvel movies, but they were unspecified. So, if there will be more movies or not remains to be seen, but I like the idea of Loki turning up in the shadows when people least expect him, but you never know these things, the world changes and the things change, but I feel like I know who Loki is, so I wouldn't mind. — Tom Hiddleston

In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment. — Barbara Ehrenreich

It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship. — John Fuller

Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week. — Philip K. Dick

It's perhaps significant that God declares His completed Creation "very good" and that Adam is an afterthought, his goodness unspecified. — Peter Manseau

The Andy Griffith Show was anachronistic. The denizens of Mayberry wore clothing of uncertain vintage and hair of indeterminate style and drove cars of unspecified age. Scant mention was made of current affairs or changing times. Telephone calls were placed through a human operator, and no one seemed to own a television set. — Daniel De Vise

Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest. — Sarah Hall

[T]he most elaborate code of [law]... would still have left unspecified a hundred ways in which wreckers of Communism could have sidetracked it without ever having to face the essential questions: are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth? have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized community? That is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate" persons who could not answer them satisfactorily. — George Bernard Shaw

When anger is not trampling roughshod through our nervous system, it is sitting sullenly in some unspecified internal organ. "She's got a lot of anger in her," people will say (it nestles, presumably, somewhere in the gut), or, "He's a deeply angry man" (as opposed, presumably, to a superficially angry one). If anger isn't released, it "turns inward" and metamorphoses into another creature altogether. — Carol Tavris

Except that now, for having accused Ravi of an unspecified crime he hadn't committed, I was as good as dead. In years subsequent, when he was in the mood to terrorize me, he would whisper to me, Just wait till we're alone. You're the next goat! — Yann Martel

The Creator's example of rest is a reason for His not recording the end of the seventh day. The first six days were concluded by the cycle of evening and morning, but the ending of the seventh day is not recorded. For Adam and Eve the seventh day ended as had the previous six days; the cessation of the day, however, is left unspecified to picture the eternal rest that God would provide for His people. — Christopher John Donato

I can't wait to get out of the house. I can't wait to get out of here. I've been telling myself this all week. The 'getting out of here' part is unspecified, though. Maybe I simply want to get away from life — Candace Bushnell

Reciprocal altruism, meanwhile, is rampant in Washington and is the primary channel through which interest groups have succeeded in corrupting government. As the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig points out, interest groups are able to influence members of Congress legally simply by making donations and waiting for unspecified return favors. And sometimes, the legislator is the one initiating the gift exchange, favoring an interest group in the expectation that he will get some sort of benefit from it after leaving office. — Anonymous

Right before you head out running, it can be hard to remember exactly why you're doing it. You often have to override a nagging sense of futility, lacing up your shoes, telling yourslef that no matter how unlikely it seems right now, after you finish you will be glad you went. It's only afterward that it makes sense, although even then it's hard to rationalize why. You just feel right. After a run, you feel at one with the world, as though some unspecified, innate need has been fulfilled. — Adharanand Finn