Quotes About Never Being Heard

“I've started to have dreams while I'm awake. I remember music I've never heard ... I've got all this extra stuff in my head, but I'm forgetting things from my own life. I feel like I'm being taken over.”

— Bryony Pearce

“But what I heard was a low insistent murmur, with pauses for reply in which no reply was made. It had a hypnotic quality that I had never heard in any voice: a blend of urgency, cajolery, and extreme tenderness, and with below it the deep vibrato of a held-in laugh that might break out at any moment. It was the voice of someone wanting something very much and confident of getting it, but at the same time willing, no, constrained, to plead for it with all the force of his being.”

— L.P. Hartley

“So Marie couldn't talk to anyone about her adventures, but the idea of that wonderful fairyland lingered on. She thought she heard murmurs of sweet sound, she saw it all again the moment she let her mind dwell on it, and so it was that instead of playing as usual she could sit still, never moving but deep in her own thoughts, with the result that she was scolded for being a little dreamer.”

— E.T.A. Hoffmann

“If you hold back on the emotions
if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them
you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely.”

— Mitch Albom

“I'd heard about people falling in love, and I'd heard about lust. What I had never heard about was this all-consuming need to be inside another human being. I felt this desperate compulsion to become one with him. This was desire. This was to crave. This was what if felt like to want.”

— Ella Frank

“All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond ... flesh, the moment of being alive ... then nothing. I had searched in superstition ... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so ... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me ... I saw that those simple things might be true ... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.”

— Sebastian Faulks

“Everything is interim. Everything is a path or a preparation for the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is. Life is like that, of course, twisty and surprising. But life with God is like that exponentially. We can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we're not listening, but the voice of God has a way of being heard. It seeps in like smoke or vapor even when we've barred the door against any last-minute changes, and it moves us to different countries and different emotional territories and different ways of living. It keeps us moving and dancing and watching, and never lets us drop down into a life set on cruise control or a life ruled by remote control. Life with God is a dancing dream, full of flashes and last-minute exits and generally all the things we've said we'll never do. And with the surprises comes great hope.”

— Shauna Niequist

“I've got to have wheels," Theo called after him, and swore under his breath as he heard his father
walk down the stairs. "You might as well be dead out here without wheels." He flopped back on the
bed to brood up at the ceiling.
Maddy just shook her head. "You're such a moron, Theo."
"You're so ugly, Maddy."
"You're never going to get a car if you nag him. If I help you get a car, you have to drive me to the
mall twelve times, without being mean about it."
"How are you going to help me get a car, you little geek?" But he was already considering. She
almost always got what she wanted.
She sauntered into the room, made herself at home. "First the deal. Then we discuss”

— Nora Roberts

“So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So what is this? You're ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and entered nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don't know about? What exactly is the story here?”

— David Foster Wallace

“Why are you being so nice to me?' I asked her.
'You know,' she said, 'when you say stuff like that I just want to slap you.'
'What?'
'You heard me.' She picked up her beer and took a swallow, still watching me. Then she said, 'Colie, you should never be surprised when people treat you with respect. You should expect it.'
I shook my head. 'You don't know-' I began. But, as usual, she didn't let me finish.
'Yes,' she said simply. 'I do know. I've watched you, Colie. You walk around like a dog waiting to be kicked, and when someone does, you pout and cry like you didn't deserve it.'
'No one deserves to be kicked,' I said.
'I disagree,' she said flatly. 'You do if you don't think you're worth any better.”

— Sarah Dessen

“The university's preponderant "Greek system"-I never heard the words without the echo of the expression Dad and the valley men had for being deeply baffled: It's Greek to me -seemed to be meant to bin students into housefuls as alike themselves as could be achieved. It worked wonderfully; there were entire fraternities and sororities where everyone looked like a first cousin of everyone else. And the system's snugness paced itself on from there. Rush Week to Homecoming to winter proms to May Week and with keg parties and mixers betweentimes, residents of Greek Row could count on a college life as preciously tempoed as a cotillion.”

— Ivan Doig

“As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise
and inexplicably
to be envied.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

“Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.”

— Jodi Picoult

“That's right," Holly had said. "I bet there were, but I bet they didn't work as well as a plastic bag," and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets.”

— Laura Kasischke

“Ty grabbed my phone and threatened to tell Otter that I liked being spanked during sex.
This proceeded to lead up on a long tangent where I had to have him explain to me how he knows about stuff like people getting spanked during sex. H said he might have heard it mentioned while watching MSNBC. I told him he was grounded from watching the news channels for a week. That's where this whole sidebar should have ended, but then I was forced to explain S & M and bondage to my little brother, who was persistent on the topic, and who kept staring at me with mounting horror when I finally /did/ explain, and I realized I had maybe gone too far, and we had to spend the next five minutes swearing to God that I had never nor would I ever attempt to do anything like that. He might now be the only nine-year-old who has heard the terms "cock ring" and "fisting". My parenting skills are unparalleled.”

— T.J. Klune

“I've never heard of a man's cock being described as a fang before. - Rapahel”

— Nalini Singh

“An enemy soldier never seemed to be alone
one human being like any other
but followed, crushed from all directions by innumerable ghosts, the missing and the dead. Speaking to him wasn't like speaking to a solitary man but to an invisible multitude; nothing that was said was either spoken or heard with simplicity: there was always that strange sensation of being no more than lips that spoke for so many others, others who had been silenced.”

— Irène Némirovsky

“People get to a certain age and success that they stop being curious. I'm still curious because I haven't really had that success. I've never done a record to catch whatever the latest sound is. It's my love of music, eclectic-ness, and the music that I heard my entire life that seeps in. That's what you're hearing.”

— Jill Sobule

“You realize I had half my guard out searching for you?" Eddard Stark said when they were alone. "Septa Mordane is beside herself with fear. She's in the sept praying for your safe return. Arya, you know you are never to go beyond the castle gates without my leave."
"I didn't go out the gates," she blurted. "Well, I didn't mean to. I was down in the dungeons, only they turned into this tunnel. It was all dark, and I didn't have a torch or a candle to see by, so I had to follow. I couldn't go back the way I came on account of the monsters. Father, they were talking about killing you! Not the monsters, the two men. They didn't see me, I was being still as stone and quiet as a shadow, but I heard them. They said you had a book and a bastard and if one Hand could die, why not a second? Is that the book? Jon's the bastard, I bet.”

— George R.R. Martin

“This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)”

— Don DeLillo

“I should count myself most fortunate ... " Swann was beginning, a trifle pompously, when the Doctor broke in derisively. Having once heard it said, and never having forgotten that in general conversation emphasis and the use of formal expressions were out of date, whenever he heard a solemn word used seriously, as the word 'fortunate' had been used just now by Swann, he at once assumed that the speaker was being deliberately pedantic. And if, moreover, the same word happened to occur, also, in what he called an old 'tag' or 'saw,' however common it might still be in current usage, the Doctor jumped to the conclusion that the whole thing was a joke, and interrupted with the remaining words of the quotation, which he seemed to charge the speaker with having intended to introduce at that point, although in reality it had never entered his mind.
"Most fortunate for France!" he recited wickedly, shooting up both arms with great vigour.”

— Marcel Proust

“14 But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them? 15 And how will anyone go and tell them without being sent?”

— Anonymous.

“My entire life, all I ever wanted was you to be real. Then I came here, and found out that you were. That first day I found out you were real, the first time I saw your face and heard your voice, it was all I could ever asked for. Everything else after that has been a gift I could never dream of deserving, would never thought of asking you. Learning to know you, for real, being with you every day ... I want you to know that I never thought I could be so happy. Being with you is the definition of happiness I have.”

— Sarah Rees Brennan

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?”

— George Orwell

“Breakfast was ready. He could hear his father asking for coffee. Why did his father have to yell all the time? Couldn't he talk in a low voice? Everybody in the neighborhood knew everything that went on in their house on account of his father constantly shouting. The Moreys next door - you never heard a peep out of them, never; quiet American people. But his father wasn't satisfied with being an Italian, he had to be a noisy Italian.
    'Arturo,' his mother called. 'Breakfast.'
    As if he didn't know breakfast was ready! As if everybody in Colorado didn't know by this time that the Bandini family was having breakfast!”

— John Fante

“One of the worst incidents of that era caused no complaints at all: this was a sort of good-natured firepower demonstration, which occured one Sunday morning about three-thirty. For reasons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12 gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter, and crashing glass. Yet the neighbors reacted with total silence. For a while I assumed that some freakish wind pocket had absorbed all the noise and carried it out to sea, but after my eviction I learned otherwise. Every one of the shots had been duly recorded on the gossip log. Another tenant in the building told me the landlord was convinced, by all the tales he'd heard, that the interior of my apartment was reduced to rubble by orgies, brawls, fires, and wanton shooting. He had even heard stories about motorcycles being driven in and out the front door.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [ ... ]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.”

— Nicole Krauss

“As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless.”

— Nicole Krauss

“For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened-and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?-Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.”

— Junot Díaz

“On a clear day, rise and look around you and you'll see who you are on a clear day, how it will astound you that the glow of your being outshines every star! You feel part of every mountain, sea and shore. You can hear from far and near a world you've never heard before And on that clear day you can see forever more”

— Alan Jay Lerner

“Blackjack," Percy said, "this is Piper and Jason. They're friends."
The horse nickered.
"Uh, maybe later," Percy answered.
Piper had heard that Percy could speak to horses, being the son of the horse lord Poseidon, but she'd never seen it in action.
"What does Blackjack want?" she asked.
"Donuts," Percy said. "Always donuts.”

— Rick Riordan

“I heard an Englishman, who had been long resident in America, declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking, in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home, he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose ... can ... be found nowhere else, except ... in an ant's nest.”

— Frances Trollope

“I never heard the expression, "A strong man," unless somebody was in the gym lifting a heavy barbell. Why is there a difference between being an ambitious, driven woman or passionate woman and a passionate man? That is something that has come up a lot.”

— Megan Griffiths

“It's not wrong to be upset. It's not wrong to cry. It's not wrong to want attention. It's not even wrong to scream or throw a fit. What is wrong is to keep it all inside. What is wrong is to blame and punish yourself for simply being human. What is wrong is to never be heard and to be alone in your pain. Share it. Let it out.”

— Bryant H. McGill

“As I lay down my pen, let me record my immovable conviction that His is the noblest service in which any human being can spend or be spent; and that, if God gave me back my life to be lived over again, I would without one quiver of hesitation lay it on the altar to Christ, that He might use it as before in similar ministries of love, especially among those who have never yet heard the name of Jesus ... God gave His best, His Son, to me; and I give back my best, my all, to Him.”

— John Gibson Paton

“Why does it seem to be more and more challenging to find a perfect mate or maintain a happy and compatible relationship? Was love always this difficult? Haven't we heard stories of people being truly fulfilled and happy in love? Is love a myth? There are more people on the planet than ever before, and traveling the world has never been easier. Not only that; now we can use technologies like the Internet to connect with others. So what is the problem? Why does it seem to be more complicated than ever to meet the right person and live happily ever after?”

— Pamala Oslie

“In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature - both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.”

— Shirley Hazzard

“Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad.”

— John Coltrane

“The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.”

— H.L. Mencken

“I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.”

— William James