Unspeakable Quotes

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.”
― Terence McKenna

“I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Unspeakable feelings need to find expression in words. However... verbalization of very intense feelings may be a difficult task.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

“There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.
Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable.”
― Toba Beta

“I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“There are things which couldn't be expressed by the words,
when you've mastered certain lesson for more than 30 years.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“This book appears at a time when public discussion of the common atrocities of sexual and domestic life has been made possible by the women’s movement, and when public discussion of the common atrocities of political life has been made possible by the movement for human rights. I expect the book to be controversial—first, because it is written from a feminist perspective; second, because it challenges established diagnostic concepts; but third and perhaps most importantly, because it speaks about horrible things, things that no one really wants to hear about.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering”
― Frank X. Barron, Unusual Associates: A Festschrift for Frank Barron

“And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“In awakening, what's revealed to us is that we are not a thing, nor a person, nor even an entity. What we are is that which manifests as all things, as all experiences, as all personalities. We are that which dreams the whole world into existence. Spiritual awakening reveals that that which is unspeakable is actually what we are.”
― Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

“It makes you crazy, for something you know to be true, know from the very core or root of you, to remain unspeakable.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“Memories of traumatic experiences may not be primarily retrieved as narratives. Our own and others’ research has suggested that PTSD traumatized people’s difficulties with putting memories into words are reflected in actual changes in brain activity.
(van der Kolk, Hopper & Osterman, 2001)
Trauma and Cognitive Science, Chapter 1”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk

“My family says they are proud of me. Of course, I would rather hear this than the contrary, but I cannot say that I am proud of myself, so I find that I cannot 'talk about it'.”
― Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War

“Rien de ce qu'on vous dit n'est, quand vous entrez dans le monde où ce qui est ne peut plus être vraiment dit.”
― Philippe Lançon, Le Lambeau

“But too much rain
can translate anything to unspeakable.”
― Marianne Boruch, Cadaver, Speak

“Unspeakable"--unspeakability?--comes in three varieties.
First, that which cannot be said because one does not know it, and therefore cannot say it.
Second, that which cannot be spoken because it is culturally impermissible to do so.
And third, that which cannot be named because it is impossible, since the language provides no terms, no words to enable articulation.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life