Unable

Famous quotes containing the word unable:

    In his comprehensive delight in all experience Dickens resembles Walt Whitman, but he was innocent of that nebulous transcendentalism that blurred Whitman’s universe into vast misty panoramas and left him, for all his huge democratic vistas, unable to tell a story or paint a single concrete human being.
    Edgar Johnson (1912–1990)

    There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.
    Joseph Addison (1672–1719)

    compassion
    turns in on itself
    biting its tongue, unable to cry out
    or give it a name.
    Denise Levertov (b. 1923)