Quotes & Sayings About Unwritten

Enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them. — Emily Carr

The future is unwritten. — Joe Strummer

There is some unwritten code or law that all women or means must be into Hinduism or Mysticism or psychics by the time they reach fifty years of age. The male equivalent is ornate guns. All aging women find psychics, all aging males find gun cabinets and expensive brandy. There's your truth. — Nathan Yocum

Assimilated by the deceit of its divine origin, its tenets are reward for obedience, punishment for transgression, both holding good for all time (this world and another). This moral code is a dramatised burlesque of the conceptive faculty, but is never so perfect or simple in that it allows latitude for change in any sense, so becomes dissociated from evolution, etc; and this divorce loses any utility and of necessity for its own preservation and the sympathy desired, evolves contradictions or a complication to give relationship. Transgressing its commandments, dishonesty shows us its iniquity, for our justification; or simultaneously we create an excuse or reason for the sin by a distortion of the moral code, that allows some incongruity. (Usually retaing a few unforgiveable sins- and an unwritten law.) — Austin Osman Spare

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

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

Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day. — Arthur Phillips

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

She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present. — Virginia Woolf

We will remain unwritten through history, no X will mark us on the map; but in books of prose and poetry, you loved me once, in a paragraph. — Lang Leav

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 -

There is no law in the world - there is no law unwritten, there's no law on the books - that's gonna stop a criminal from getting a gun. — Rush Limbaugh

,000 people in Hampden Park. Of course they're all Scottish. Because no one else goes there. The English have an unwritten rule: they only go to places they might get back from. — Billy Connolly

'What is your desired salary?' The unwritten rule when it comes to salary is this: whoever proposes a number first loses. When you interview, you should never feel pressured to answer this question. Simply let your interviewer know that the most important thing to you is how well you fit the position. — Travis Bradberry

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

Life in its essence is a mere manifestation of an unwritten perpetual contract with eternity. — Moutasem Algharati

Cemeteries are full of unfulfilled dreams ... countless echoes of 'could have' and 'should have' ... countless books unwritten ... countless songs unsung ... I want to live my life in such a way that when my body is laid to rest, it will be a well needed rest from a life well lived, a song well sung, a book well written, opportunities well explored, and a love well expressed. — Steve Maraboli

This is just your unwritten life. You didn't expect it, it just happened. — Amy Shannon

Goals that are not written down and developed into plans are like bullets without powder in the cartridge. People with unwritten goals go through life shooting blanks. — Brian Tracy

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

The General Cemetery's unwritten motto is All the Names, although it should be said that, in fact, these three words fit the Central Registry like a glove, because it is there that all the names are to be found, both those of the dead and those of the living, while the cemetery, given its role as ultimate destination and ultimate depository, has to content itself only with the names of the dead. This mathematical evidence, however, is not enough to silence the keepers of the General Cemetery who, confronted by what they call their apparent numerical inferiority, usually shrug their shoulders and argue, With time and patience everyone ends up here, the Central Registry, from this point of view, is merely a tributary of the General Cemetery. — Jose Saramago

It is no accident that, of the early Jesuit scholars who were pioneers in making China's culture known in Europe, those who concerned themselves with the Book of Changes were all later declared to be insane or heretic. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves the study of the I Ching is not to be taken lightly. By an unwritten law, only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready to learn from it. Confucius is said to have been seventy years old when he first took up the Book of Changes. — Hellmut Wilhelm

Reflections ... passages in time..sometimes, the only things that make sense..the only peace I find..is found somewhere, unwritten..in between the lines. — Victoria June

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

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

So far from genius discarding law, rather is it the supreme joy of genius to re-enact the eternal and unwritten law in the chamber of its own intel-lect. — Charles Henry Parkhurst

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

I'm a writer as rarely as possible, when forced by an idea too lovely to let die unwritten — Richard Bach

I'm up to my ears in unwritten words. — J.D. Salinger

There's kind of an unwritten rule, Don't call your captain out at a Ryder Cup, win, loss or draw, you just don't. — Graeme McDowell

Irrespective of nationality, soldiers are always open to the same discomfort and to the same comradeship the world over. I'll make things easy for you if you make things easy for me. That is, after all the unwritten law of the barracks. — Peter Ustinov

The real treasure of life, the one difficult to find and hard to attain, is never far from us. That's an unwritten rule on this earth. What we desperately desire and need most is buried in the recesses of our innermost being all along. This is the open secret found in many traditions and told in many ways. Yet it remains a secret
because trusting in oneself remains one of the hardest things to do in life. — Michael Meade

Within the songwriting community, there are these unwritten rules for the way that a song should be written in country music, and I think that those rules are constantly being broken over the years, and the molds change and the process is evolving. — Sam Hunt

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

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

When someone you love dies, people ask you how you're doing, but they don't really want to know. They seek affirmation that you're okay, that you appreciate their concern, that life goes on and so can they. Secretly they wonder when the statute of limitations on asking expires (its three months, by the way. Written or unwritten, that's about all the time it takes for people to forget the one thing that you never will). — Sarah Ockler

the one
who will jolt awake
all the unwritten
the unsung
and the unlived
in me.

i am waiting
for him. — Sanober Khan

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet? — Rebecca West

It is contended that those who have been bred at Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sentiment within each of those schools is high-toned and manly; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally admired, meanness despised, manly feelings and generous conduct are encouraged: that an unwritten code of honor deals to the spoiled child of rank, and to the child of upstart wealth an even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both, and does all that can be done to make them gentlemen. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Control in business is the combination of written and unwritten rules that create an organizational decision framework and staff hierarchy. — Holly Duckworth

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

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

I can't constantly be trying to write the unwritten song, the song that the 15-year-old girl needs. I need to write the song that I need. — Kathleen Hanna

I think that you sign a sort of unwritten contract when you become a public figure, when you become an actor, that you're sacrificing a certain amount of privacy and parts of your life change. — Olivia Wilde

The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness. — Italo Calvino

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

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

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

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

I was amused to note that even vampires obeyed the unwritten rules of elevator etiquette. — Jim C. Hines

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

Look in; and learn the wrong, and right,
From your own soul's unwritten laws.
And when you question, or demur,
Let Love be your Interpreter. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it's not corruption at all - it's law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law. — Robert Jackson Bennett

I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. — Walt Whitman

I have not, in general, much belief in the ability of woman as a creative artist. Unwritten lyrics, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson said once when we conversed on this subject, should be her forte. — Fredrika Bremer

What is the little one thinking about?
Very wonderful things, no doubt;
Unwritten history!
Unfathomed mystery!
Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks,
And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks,
As if his head were as full of kinks
And curious riddles as any sphinx! — J.G. Holland

About ten days ago I got started on a new book, and am completely, brazenly devoted to it: my hair is uncut, my letters are unwritten, the house is a shambles, and I sit here as happy as Mrs. Jellaby, though I am in 1836, not Africa. It won't go on like this, I shall fall over some obstacle, and wake out of my dreams with a black eye and broken shins: but while it does last, I daren't interrupt it. I haven't had such a spell of writing for nearly three years. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

And yet the irony was that she soon placed herself in the margins voluntarily, giving up work for family, because she imagined that when she eventually arrived at her deathbed, she would feel more regret about unborn children than unwritten books. — Matt Haig

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

He sat with his cup of tea at the kitchen table. On the window ledge beside him stood the two bottles of cherry brandy, one half empty, the other full. Romantic thoughts stirred in the silence, touching again on unwritten novels and the past. He suddenly had the sensation of being abroad, out of reach of yesterday's existence. This abroad was a place of tranquillity, a Switzerland of the soul blanketed in snows of peace, permeated with a dread of causing disturbance; where no bird sang or called, as if out of no desire to. — Andrey Kurkov

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

I'm about to start reading it again, because what good is a story you only want to read once? — Bill Willingham

I think it's especially important for an editor to say what he's enjoying. For a novelist to be told, midstream, what he's doing right can actually influence the unwritten parts of a novel in a positive way - praise helps a writer know what's good about what he's written, what's interesting and exciting, and what to work for in writing the conclusion. — Donna Tartt

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

There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys, that I am their friend. — Marion Barry

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

There's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you're labeled anti-Semitic. — Spike Lee

Networking is the No. 1 unwritten rule of success in business. — Sallie Krawcheck

Paul commands: 'Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the Traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or by our letter.' From this it is clear that they did not hand down everything by letter, but there is much also that was not written. Like that which was written, the unwritten too is worthy of belief. So let us regard the Tradition of the Church also as worthy of belief. Is it a Tradition? Seek no further. — Saint John Chrysostom

A mind possessed
by unmade books,
unwritten lines
on empty hooks. — Michael Faudet

If one could only discover the unwritten bases of black magic and apply formulae to them, we would find that they were merely another form of science ... perhaps less advance, perhaps more. — Charles Beaumont

History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible. — Lawrence James

Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law. — George Orwell

Emma, you and your poetry, me and my acting--what are we trying to do? We can't top this city. We poor would-be artists can't compete with or improve on the rich density of human experience on any random, average, slow summer night in New York--who are we trying to kid? In the overheard conversation in the elevator, in the five minutes of talk the panhandler gives you before hitting you for the handout, in the brief give-and-take when you are going out and the cleaning lady is coming in--there are the real stories, incredible, heartbreaking and ridiculous, there are the command performances, the Great American Novels but forever unwritten, untoppable, and so beautifully unaware. — Wilton Barnhardt

That's the unwritten rule in hip-hop. If I get on a record with you, I want to smash you. That's it. Every MC knows that. If I'm on a track with you, I want to be the best on the track. That's just how it is in hip-hop. — Ja Rule

I always want to keep things unwritten. I'm inspired by Bob Dylan, who's kept evolving and changing his sound. I think that's what you should do as an artist. Why be comfortable? — Lykke Li

A human wasn't an acceptable boyfriend for a witch; nor would a human wish to date a witch. The two would never in a million light years be interested in each other. Then, again, unwritten rules were made to be broken. — Terry Spear

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family. — Christopher Lasch

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

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

I filled in for Papa Roach because we weren't doing much. Unwritten Law had a few more shows booked, but I got the call to fill in again at the end of the year. I was like, "I have to make myself available to these guys." — Tony Palermo

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

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

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

In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction. — Anthony Hope

The future isn't just unwritten, it's unsearched. — Bruce Sterling

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

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

The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime. — Howard Fast

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. After history's first recorded instance of a focus group riot, the personal shopper program was extensively rewritten. — John Scalzi

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.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. — Fernando Pessoa

This is the real unwritten rule: You don't want what you know you shouldn't. And I haven't just broken that rule. I have wrecked it, smashed it, and still ...
And still I want. — Elizabeth Scott

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

There's a large core of powerlessness which is balanced against the unwritten contract that says that if you behave, you'll be okay. No wonder people pay so much attention to knowing the rules, to knowing the right people, to not making waves, to never making errors
to not risking, trying, innovating. — Judith M Bardwick

Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models. — George Akerlof

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

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

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