Unwritten Quotes - Page 3

• When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

  Philip Roth

  Jobs, Writing, Years

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• 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

  Law, Joy, Genius

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• You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

  Miguel Syjuco

  Memories, Cities, Shopping

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• I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Book, Men, Different

  "Discours touchant la méthode de la certitude et l’art d’inventer". Book by Gottfried Leibniz, 1690.

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• Proverbs were anterior to boots, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Law, Age, Boots

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• 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

  Writing, Cities, Faces

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• There is a brotherliness about a drinking person, which is coldly lacking in the straight and narrow enemies of drink; the difference between the two is more marked than nationality or belief: it is an opposite species altogether. It is against the unwritten laws of congeniality for them to mix. For me, a man who does not drink is distinctly indecent.

  Caitlin Thomas

  Drinking, Men, Law

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• 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

  Thinking, Laughing, Doubt

  J. G. HOLLAND (1863). “BITTER-SWEET A POEM”, p.26

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• 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

  Artist, Creative, Belief

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• 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

  God, Tree, Dumb

  Emily Carr (2009). “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, p.56, D & M Publishers

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• 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

  People, Goal, Shooting

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• Each one could be a Jesus mild,
  Each one has been a little child,
  A little child with laughing look,
  A lovely white unwritten book;
  A book that God will take, my friend,
  As each goes out at journey's end.

  John Masefield

  Jesus, Children, Book

  John Masefield (1978). “Selected poems”, Not Avail

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• 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

  Dream, Book, Fall

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• 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

  Long, Would Be, Pages

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

  Aristotle

  Plato, Teaching, Giving

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• One of the unwritten rules in a presidential news conference is that he'll answer questions. If he chooses not to, there's not much you can do about it other than make yourself look like an idiot screaming, which to me is counterproductive.

  Gwen Ifill

  Presidential, Looks, News

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• 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

  Artist, Thinking, Sound

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• ...those who can bear to observe only unwritten laws-they all head for the taiga.

  Sylvain Tesson

  Law, Bears

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• There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give.

  Frank Herbert

  Book, Giving, Entertainment

  Frank Herbert (1987). “Heretics of Dune”, p.9, Penguin

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

  Richard Bach

  Ideas, Lovely, Dies

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• 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

  Kids, Mirrors, Cyberspace

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• These are party-sanctioned debates. This is a presidential election, you show up at the debates. These are the rules. We have a series of unwritten rules of how campaigns are run, and everybody has followed those rules consistently over the decades. And no one has really even seriously thought about breaking them.

  Ryan Grim

  Running, Party, Presidential

  "Roundtable: Donald Trump's Media Tactics". "All Things Considered" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. January 30, 2016.

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• 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

  Filled In, Years, Law

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Editors

  Interview with Michael Pietsch, www.slate.com. October 11, 2013.

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• There's a kind of unwritten rule: Don't say anything at all, and everything will be fine. It's a producer's medium. The directors aren't there to make any decisions. They're not going to change anything.

  Robert Carlyle

  Decision, Say Anything, Directors

  "Robert Carlyle on California Solo, American vs. British TV, and the appeal of fairy tales". interview with Sam Adams, film.avclub.com. December 20, 2012.

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