Unshared Quotes

“Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”

— Charlotte Brontë

“These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.”

— Jim Crace

“Not just the listeners, either. Miro had to be fair-he was as impatient with himself as they were. When he thought of the sheer effort involved in explaining a complicated idea, when he anticipated trying to form the words with lips and tongue and jaws that wouldn't obey him, when he thought of how long it would all take, he usually felt too weary to speak. His mind raced on and on, as fast as ever, thinking so many thoughts that at times Miro wanted his brain to shut down, to be silent and give him peace. But his thoughts remained his own, unshared.”

— Orson Scott Card

“She had to tell somebody, and Matthew would do. He would not be particularly interested, she knew, but she would tell him anyway. She had to share her joy, as Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk ... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could've been captured in words.”

— Richelle E. Goodrich

“And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness ... . And this was most vexing of all," he noted, "HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”

— Jon Krakauer

“I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.”

— John Le Carre

“Success unshared is failure.”

— John Paul DeJoria

“But it is well to remember that we are dealing with nations every one of which has a direct individual interest to serve, and there is grave danger in an unshared idealism.”

— Henry Cabot Lodge

“There is no delight in owning anything unshared.”

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“In the back seat the three now silent, soot-smeared children absorbed it all-the choking creosote stench, the roar of wind and flame, the wild rocking of a car being driven that hard, the heat, the emotion so raw and exposed it was like butchered flesh; the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage-the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family.”

— Richard Flanagan

“Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died.”

— Glen Duncan

“It's not a confession if no one reads it. It's just an unshared secret.”

— Colleen Hoover

“Not that one choose to draw aside in churlish mein or vein, From common lot of what life holds of pleasure, toil or pain But that the call-s to rise and cruise alone with dreams unshared Or plan alone for some far goal, for which none else has cared Or fight alone for what you hold is worth a warrior-s strife And ask no gain or fame or aught beyond the joy of life.”

— Gill Robb Wilson

“An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen, but greatens, his life.”

— Stephen Samuel Wise

“A success unshared is a failure.”

— John Paul DeJoria

“An unshared happiness is not happiness.”

— Boris Pasternak

“A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.”

— Harold Rosenberg

“When profit is unshared, it's less likely to grow greater.”

— Malcolm Forbes