Impenetrable Quotes

1. "Worse, he seemed as impassive as some of the killers he'd interrogated. That more than anything was what struck him. Men who killed serially suffered a unique lack of affect. You felt this in advance, a physical pressure before they entered a room. There was something impenetrable and thick behind their eyes, a gaze that was shark-dumb. They were people, Hastroll thought, who could not be touched by love."
Author: Adam Ross

2. "The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties – this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."
Author: Albert Einstein

3. "I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself."
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

4. "[That was] the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition."
Author: Anna Quindlen

5. "I see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We're surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other. We look at the fighting down below and the peace and beauty up above. In the meantime, we've been cut off by the dark mass of clouds, so that we can go neither up nor down. It looms before us like an impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. I can only cry out and implore, "Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us out!"
Author: Anne Frank

6. "It started when we were little kids.Free spirits, but alreadytormented by our own handsgiven to us by our parents.We got together and wrote on desksand slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountainsand slipped through whatevercracks we could find,minds altered, we didn't falterin portraving hysterical andtragic characters in a smogfilled universe.we loved the dirty cityand the journeys away from it.We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves,chase tails round and round in downward spirals,leaving trail of irretrievable,vital life juice behind.Still, thebrothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzzwas impenetrableand we lived inside itlaughing with no clothes, andeverything experimental 'tilldeath was upon us.In our face, mortality."
Author: Anthony Kiedis

7. "The future was something I had resolutely ignored. If didn't put my full attention to the day at hand, I was afraid that the impenetrable dark on the horizon would engulf me"
Author: Barbara Morgenroth

8. "Calvin: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report? Hobbes: (Reading Calvin's paper) "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender modes." Calvin: Academia, here I come!"
Author: Bill Watterson

9. "There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps."
Author: Billy Collins

10. "From the pocket of her windbreaker he extracted what he falsely believed to be a portable marine radio, which along with two granola bars he'd pilfered from Honey's belongings after she was snatched by the club-handed lunatic. Shreave started pressing buttons on the compact gadget and barking, "Mayday! Mayday!There was no response from the Coast Guard pilot or any other human, and for a good reason. Except for its LED screen, the instrument in Shreave's possession was electronically dissimilar to a radio in all significant respects. Most crucial was the absence of either an audio receiver or a transmitter."SOS! SOS!" he persisted. "Help!"The device was in fact a mobile GPS unit, as technogically impenetrable to Shreave as the Taser gun he'd found beneath Honey's bed."
Author: Carl Hiaasen

11. "Your voice has haunted every inch of my soul since the last time I heard it…my world had been so dark, void of sound and then I heard you sing again—and it exploded. Everything came crashing down on me that I'd been holding in, and then I was just a mess. But I wasn't suffering in silence anymore. I was suffering from the impenetrable sound of your voice on repeat in my head."
Author: Cassandra Giovanni

12. "The female crab has an impenetrable shell, she is so hard on the outside and yet so soft within. There is no possible point of access. The male crab must wait a whole year until the female decides to shed her shell to grow a new one. And it is only at that moment of vulnerability that the patient crab can triumph in his love."
Author: Danny Scheinmann

13. "The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes."
Author: Eckhart Tolle

14. "I usually describe my father as a man given to impenetrable solitude. If I turn the phrase I can apply it to Johnny. Impenetrable happiness. For a long time I couldn't enter his life because his happiness, or appearance of happiness - his unending smiles - locked the door. An ingenious strategy, to surround the thorns with a castle."
Author: Elizabeth Hay

15. "A Man's suicide is the ultimate violence he can fling against the granite circumstance he could not vanquish. Its a lonely and desperate act of supreme courage, not weakness. But it is also an admission of total failure, and the destruction of the self is the end of one person's struggle, an end where from there would be no rebirth or resurrection-nothing but the blackness, the impenetrable muck the hides everything, sometimes even the reason for death itself."
Author: F. Sionil José

16. "What was he? A mere human, stuck between the rungs of blended adolescence and nascent adulthood. What power did he command over the mysterious forces of love? Which sword could shatter the impenetrable armour of desire?"
Author: Faraaz Kazi

17. "Wanderer, who are you? I watch you go on your way, without scorn, without love, with impenetrable eyes - damp and downhearted, like a plumb line that returns unsatisfied from every depth back into the light (what was it looking for down there?), with a breast that does not sigh, with lips that hide their disgust, with a hand that only grips slowly: who are you? What have you done? Take a rest here, this spot is hospitable to everyone, - relax! And whoever you may be: what would you like now? What do you find relaxing? Just name it: I'll give you whatever I have! - "Relaxing? Relaxing? How inquisitive you are! What are you saying! But please, give me - -" What? What? Just say it! - "Another mask! A second mask!" ..."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "No había ningún misterio en el corazón de un Buendía que fuera impenetrable para ella, porque un siglo de naipes y de experiencia le había enseñado que la historia de la familia era un engranaje de repeticiones irreparables, una rueda giratoria que hubiera seguido dando vueltas hasta la eternidad, de no haber sido por el desgaste progresivo e irremediable del eje."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

19. "His hair was shorter than I remembered, tawny in this half-light, the tousled edges casually framing the clean, commanding lines of his face. His mouth, normally so stern was relaxed now and as I stared a slight sweet smile touched his lips, its curve softening the straight strong lines of his nose and brow. Finally, inevitably, I met his eyes and felt a connection that seared straight through me, down through my soles and away. Those eyes, darker than mine, the darkest blue, dark and as impenetrable as glaciers. Tonight he was real, so very real that my heart thumped, my blood sang, my legs shook."
Author: Hannah Blatchford

20. "Life within the Kremlin was shrouded in impenetrable secrecy."
Author: Harrison Salisbury

21. "Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved"
Author: Iris Murdoch

22. "When one wizard saves another wizard's life, it creates a certain bond between them. And I'm much mistaken if Voldemort wants his servant in the debt of Harry Potter." "I don't want a connection with Pettigrew!" said Harry. "He betrayed my parents!" "This is magic at its deepest, its most impenetrable, Harry. But trust me, the time may come when you will be very glad you saved Pettigrew's life."
Author: J.K. Rowling

23. "The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary."
Author: James Lee Burke

24. "From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone."
Author: Jane Hamilton

25. "I was building a perfect and nearly impenetrable facade of gleaming antiseptic steel and glass to cement onto the front of the Gothic horror of Castle Dexter."
Author: Jeff Lindsay

26. "We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring."
Author: Jon Ronson

27. "I'd known love before, and it had brought me so much pain that I had retreated behind an impenetrable wall of indifference, freezing out everything, everyone."
Author: Julie Kagawa

28. "You can't turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you've created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can't see it anymore."
Author: Katherine Allred

29. "What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass, young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to take root and send out living shoots so effectively that her all-consuming grief would soon be lost and forgotten. The wound was healing from inside."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

30. "That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable."
Author: Lionel Shriver

31. "He knew that the very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void."
Author: Marcel Proust

32. "Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be...penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable."
Author: Margaret Atwood

33. "There it is," he'd say reverentially. "The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. [..] Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head."
Author: Marisha Pessl

34. "...I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self."
Author: Muriel Barbery

35. "Taking a sip of the hot chocolate he'd made her, she met his gaze, those eerie eyes of endless black impenetrable, unreadable. "Max?" "Yes?""Will you remember me?"His heart broke into a thousand pieces. "Always."
Author: Nalini Singh

36. "For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century."
Author: Nathaniel Philbrick

37. "Then what's the problem?" He was getting irritated now. "Are you scared, V? Scared that fucking me might turn into something more?" Taunting her, he continued, "Scared that I might just be able to get past that impenetrable outer shell?"
Author: Nicole Edwards

38. "I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows."
Author: Patrick DeWitt

39. "When I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this.""Looks like you're still there, Shura.""No," he said. "I'm in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me."
Author: Paullina Simons

40. "Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these past three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We've all heard that one before."
Author: Philip Roth

41. "Images flicker, each one bringing its own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst, an impenetrable and sightless black and at best, a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory if the sorrow it brings."
Author: Pittacus Lore

42. "The small wisdom is like water in a glass:clear, transparent, pure.The great wisdom is like the water in the sea:dark, mysterious, impenetrable."
Author: Rabindranath Tagore

43. "ME LIKE THE MAGNETMen I like, I repelLike a magnet doSo if I'm nastyThen you knowI probably fancy you."It's defence," the shrinks would say."It's protects against a fall."It's impenetrable this fence of mineIt's like the Berlin Wall."
Author: Rae Earl

44. "I tried to turn my heart to the living, to the place I was, but putting seed in land not owned by me or my family seemed alien. The sandy, gray-white soil looked like dirty beach sand, not fit for growing anything. It smelled like dust. Yet weeds and trees and wildflowers grew along the roads. When we drove into town, we passed dense, impenetrable woods and fields of corn, peas, and peppers. Such new combinations of seemingly poor soil and happy flora puzzled me. Everywhere I went, I picked up the dirt, examining it for clues. Bringing anything out of such soil would require a whole new language on my part. I imagined there must be something richer and darker under the gray sand, or some trick the farmers all knew. Trick or no trick, what I had always been able to do well now seemed inaccessible. Still, I searched the yard around our house for the best spot to plant my fall garden."
Author: Rhonda Riley

45. "The fear of meeting the opposition of envy, or the illiberality of ignorance is, no doubt, the frequent cause of preventing many ingenious men from ushering opinions into the world which deviate from common practice. Hence for want of energy, the young idea is shackled with timidity and a useful thought is buried in the impenetrable gloom of eternal oblivion."
Author: Robert Fulton

46. "Knowing the Techniques of Survival........Our fears and anxieties will often drive us to build impenetrable walls that act like blinders deflecting others and preventing us from seeing who surrounds us. Getting focused to the things that matter are the Key to what has to be to COMPLETE our MISSION. "I Had Every Excuse to Fail but I Chose None" Speak Life!!!(sky)"
Author: Sebastian K. Young

47. "Even my pathological love of Japan and its beauties, glories and eccentricities is sorely tested by 'The Grudge 2,' from Takashi Shimizu, a movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points."
Author: Stephen Hunter

48. "Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt."
Author: Sun Tzu

49. "Altho' I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose Basanistos may be amusing. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro' the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.[Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp on 30 July 1810 denouncing the doctrine of the Trinity]"
Author: Thomas Jefferson

50. "...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart."
Author: Yōko Ogawa

Impenetrable Quotes Pictures