Indescribable Quotes

“Presiding over the entire attack there will be, in du Bois Reymond's words, "a general feeling of disorder," which may be experienced in either physical or emotional terms, and tax or elude the patient's powers of description.”
― Oliver Sacks, Migraine

“I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

“A soft finger touched his shoulder and he turned to see a little man smiling in the moonlight. He wore an indescribable hat, his eyes were wide and astonished, as if everything were happening for the first time, and he had a dark describable beard.”
― James Thurber, The 13 Clocks

“Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“the thing that is between you and me,
there is something between you and me...
it is ineffable what is between you and me
it is incomprehensible what is between you and me
it is indefinable what is between you and me
it is indescribable what is between you and me
but there is something between you and me
the thing that is between you and me...”
― Avijeet Das

“Manhattan across the water, the glittering towers. I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I came back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going through on glass a lightbulb at a time.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There is another important element pertinent to understanding this book, and that is a place within Dy5topia called 'The Void'. While we can, in some ways, describe and categorize Dy5topia just as we would our world, The Void escapes any such efforts. Consequently, we can only describe the inhabitants of The Void in terms of their appearance in Dy5topia as 'Interlopers'.”
― Mike Correll, DY5TOPIA: A Field Guide to the Dark Universe of Chet Zar