Inarticulacy Quotes

“They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn't mention it. And it wasn't until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She'd written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a paragraph for her to find.”
― Keith Ridgway, Hawthorn & Child

“So many writers make dope glamorous; a form of romantic transgression, or world-weariness, or poetic sensitivity, or hipness. Mainly it's the stuff of ritualistic communion among inarticulate bores.”
― Leonard Michaels

“As a result of the Scottish elite's surrender to English culture in the mid-eighteenth century the inarticulate Scot was subsequently found in evey 'rank' and 'order'.”
― James D. Young, The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class

“Ambrose had all the language required to define precisely the meaning of a cloud, the character of a sea, an attitude of rain, but to describe his own emotional weather he was limited to ‘Been better,’ ‘Been worse,’ and ‘You know yourself.’ When Christine first met Ambrose he seemed to have a great way with words but now she knew it was nothing but banter. He’d tell you about himself in a way that seemed spontaneous and open but he only began a story when he knew how it ended.”
― Garrett Carr, The Boy from the Sea