Quotes about silence
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“What [is] the prevailing attitude today among those who call themselves religious but vigorously advocate tolerance? There are three main options, ranging from the disingenuous Machiavellian--1. As a matter of political strategy, the time is not ripe for candid declarations of religious superiority, so we should temporize and let sleeping dogs lie in hopes that those of other faiths can gently be brought around over the centuries.--through truly tolerant Eisenhowerian "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious belief — and I don't care what it is" --2. It really doesn't matter which religion you swear allegiance to, as long as you have some religion.--to the even milder Moynihanian benign neglect--3. Religion is just too dear to too many to think of discarding, even though it really doesn't do any good and is simply an empty historical legacy we can afford to maintain until it quietly extinguishes itself sometime in the distant and unforeseeable future.It it no use asking people which they choose, since both extremes are so undiplomatic we can predict in advance that most people will go for some version of ecumenical tolerance whether they believe it or not. …We've got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.If this is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain, in my opinion. Is this the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence, either because they secretly believe that most of the world's population is wasting their lives in delusion (but they are too tenderhearted — or devious — to say so), or because they secretly believe that their own tradition is just such a delusion (but they fear for their own safety if they admit it)?”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

People, Lie, World, Fear

“Finding true silence requires more than quieting our surroundings. It also means quieting our souls. This is the real dilemma of living in a wordy world.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

World, Soul

“4165. Silence gives Consent.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Una cosa, hasta no ser toda, es ruido, y todo, es silencio.
Voces (1943)

“Boom! That's the house, right there, Robert. That's house I'm doing a B&E (breaking and entering)." He looked to me and he said: [shakes head and makes hissing noise through nose. Moment of silence. ] "I don't know what that means, but I'm doing it.”

Dane Cook (1972) American actor and comedian

Vicious Circle (2006)

Housing

“I possess the faculty of enjoying the company of those I — of my friends as well in silence as in conversation.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. IX : A Snake in the Grass; Gilbert to Helen

“I worked carefully in the darkness and the silence.”

François-Eudes Chanfrault (1974–2016) Composer and musician

CinemaFantastique.net interview (October 2, 2008)

“And of me you ask which choice you should make?” said the translator’s voice.
“Yes,” I said.
There was the sound of rocks grinding, followed by a brief silence, and then: “The moral choice is obvious,” said the Wreed. “It always is.”
“And?” I said. “What is the moral choice?”
More sounds of rocks, then: “Morality cannot be handed down from an external source.” … “It must come from within.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

Robert J. Sawyer book Calculating God

The Wreed wavered and vanished.
Source: Calculating God (2000), Chapter 32 (p. 309; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

“But when she tried to say something, the words always seemed trite and inadequate. Nothing measured up. When any moment might be their last, there was nothing she could ever imagine saying that had the necessary dignity to fill that instant. Silence was better. Silence had its own dignity.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 37 (p. 573)

Imagination

“Shadow is an amazing subject. Shadow is an absence. As an absence of energy you can compare it to silence or maybe cold air…. We talk about photography being simple and architecture being complex and how do you convey something that is more deep, that allows you to dream or think This is weird so you start to dream and think and you maybe go out purely from the picture but into yourself. The light and the shadow are tools to allow you to do that.”

Hélène Binet (1959) Swiss photographer

Source: Ten questions for photographer Hélène Binet http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2012/december/06/ten-questions-for-photographer-helene-binet/, Phaidon Press, 6 December 2012.

Dreams, Thinking, Light

“Real truth was out there in the shattered outhabs of Vervun hive. Real truth was waiting and silence, courage and stealth. Real truth was the ability to function in extremes. To fire a cannon and miss and try again. To fix a silver blade to the end of a las-weapon and leap from safety into a shroud of smoke, prepared as you did so to really use that makeshift spear. Real truth was a tiny hole in a man's forehead.”

Dan Abnett (1965) British comic book writer, novelist

In Remembrance (2005)

Truth, Courage, Waiting

“It is true of opinions as of other compositions that those who are seeped in them, whose ears are sensitive to literary nuances, whose antennae record subtle silences, can gather from their contents meaning beyond the words. All this presupposes, of course, a grasp of the nature of the Supreme Court's functions — the scope and limits of its constitutional authority — and often, as well, familiarity with the record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion is under scrutiny.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

"'The Administrative Side' of Chief Justice Hughes", 63 Harvard Law Review 1, 2 (1949).
Other writings

Nature

“Archie waited a beat- in strict command of the room, the silence almost unbearable- and said, "Everything in Brother Eugene's room is held together by screws. The chairs, the desks, the blackboards. Now, with your little screwdriver- maybe you'd better bring along various and assorted sizes, just in case- you start to loosen. Don't take out the screws. Just loosen them until they reach the point where they're almost ready to fall out, everything hanging by a thread…" A howl of delight came from the guys- probably Obie, who had gotten the picture, who could see the house that Archie was building, the house that didn't exist until he built it in their minds.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 35

Guy, Waiting, Housing

“in silence through the night
close to the City of Realisations;
it is here one finds the way…
…Mount Orison
the City of Days
the Tree of the lost
he journeys on…
…north of his love
a road through a valley of darkness
the islands that are not of this world
he journeys on to find his love…”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Love, World, Way, Tree

“No one should be fooled into believing that Saudi Arabia is striving towards a more open and pluralistic form of government. … The very opposite is true, what we are witnessing is a regime that is tightening its grip on the social fabric of society, choking all forms of open debate, suffocating civil society, silencing the voice of reform and imprisoning those who are striving towards modernity.”

Ben Emmerson (1963) British Queen's Counsel

As quoted in Saudi Arabia using anti-terror laws to detain and torture political dissidents, UN says https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-torture-political-dissidents-anti-terror-laws-un-mohammad-bin-salman-a8388226.html (8 June 2018), The Independent.

Fools

“Through endless time God's greatest gift is continuously given in silence. But whenmankind becomes completely deaf to the thunder of His Silence God incarnates as Man.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

44 : God Alone Is, p. 74.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)

God, Time

“Typography cracked the voices of silence.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 283

“We did not suspend our democracy in our darkest hours why are we suspending it now? the fawning over Thatcher had gone too far. We have had enough of this, It has gone on too long and it has gone too far. This put the tin hat on it the idea that we should suspend a vital part of our democratic process for a party political and private funeral, Mr Churchill didn’t ask for Parliament to be silenced, for confrontations across the House to be forbidden. When our soldiers were being laid waste in the Norway debate, the House of Commons perhaps rose to its finest 20th Century moment. Nobody said: ‘Our armed forces have suffered a disaster, the House of Commons cannot meet, the clash of ideas cannot be heard, we must muffle the drums and silence ourselves The so-called Beast of Bolsover said the argument was about class and that it was "one rule for those at the top and another for those at the bottom. We are here talking about the thing that we sometimes suggest has gone away class, That's what it is, it's about class. It's about the fact that people out there have to live their lives in a different way and there's one rule for those at the top and there's another for those at the bottom. It's never changed, I wish it had, but it hasn't. So when I heard about the chain of events it seemed to grow like topseed - first of all there was going to be some sort of ceremonial funeral, and then the next thing you (Mr Speaker) tell us that the chimes of Big Ben are going to stop and then we hear about the fact that we are going to abandon Prime Minister's question time, I mean, what's it all about? That's why the people out there are angry, a lot of them.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/margaret-thatcher-fawning-gone-far-1836314 George Galloway blasts cancellation of PMQs for Margret Thatchers funeral 16 April, 2013

People, Way, Democracy, Idea

“More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed—
Great rocks hoisted in air;
And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight
With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes...
And so he did not mention his dream of falling
But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears
That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath
Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by
And the small tree swell beneath him...
He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife,
Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,—
And so went out... For once, he forgot his pail.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Dreams, Boy, Coffee, Kiss

“Since there is no real silence, silence will contain all the sounds, all the words, all the languages, all knowledge, all memory.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Silence Is the Universal Library http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21396/Silence_Is_the_Universal_Library_ <br class="br">From the poems written in English

Knowledge, Memory

“How Doom hold heat, and preach non-violence? Shhh, he 'bout to start the speech, c'mon, silence!”

MF Doom (1971) hip hop artist from America

As Madvillain, "Raid", Madvillainy (2004)
Sourced Lines

“Water—the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomable—where is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope! or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden! But, amid all thy hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty, as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

World, Beauty, Hope, Home

“I say to those liberals hell-bent on restricting speech: rather than trying to silence voices and viewpoints you disagree with, join the debate.”

David Bossie (1965) American political activist

Free Speech Is Winning, Thanks to Citizens United http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/08/30/free-speech-is-winning-thanks-to-citizens-united/ (August 30,2014)

Hell

“I remember when I was doing a film with Fred Astaire, it was nothing for him to work three or four days on two bars of music. One evening in the dark grey hours of dusk, I was walking across the deserted MGM lot when a small, weary figure with a towel around his neck suddenly appeared out of the giant cube sound stages. It was Fred. He came over to me, threw a heavy arm around my shoulder and said: "Oh Alan, why doesn't someone tell me I cannot dance?" The tormented illogic of his question made any answer insipid, and all I could do was walk with him in silence.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Alan Jay Lerner in Lerner, Alan Jay. On the Street Where I Live. New York: Norton, 1978. p. 89. (M).

Music, Question, Appearance, Dance

“I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind — my wayward heart creates its own misery — Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child — long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.”

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) British writer and philosopher

Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd, p. 206.

Idea, Suffering, Heart, Dance

“Sometimes silence can be the strongest and most compassionate answer.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 131

“This science gave me a taste for the arts. It is Number that gives value to sounds and silences, lights and shadows, forms and spaces. Michelangelo and Bach seemed to me like divine mathematicians [calculateurs]. Already I felt that only mathematics enables works that can last. Whether as a result of patient study, or of a stormy [fulgurante] intuition, number alone can reduce all our diversities of feeling to the strict unity of a mass, a fresco, or a sculpted head.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Art, Feeling, Mathematics, Study

“She waits for me at night, she waits for me in silence.
She gives me all her tenderness and takes away my pain.
And so far she hasn't run, though I swear she's had her moments.
She still believes in miracles while others cry in vain.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

All About Soul.
Song lyrics, River of Dreams (1993)

Pain, Waiting, Cry, Night

“"Maybe it has quick save?" [Silence. ] "…No. Of—Of course, that would be asking too much."”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Day One: Garry's Incident (October 1, 2013)

“Ralph waved the conch.
"Shut up! Wait! Listen!"
He went on in the silence, borne on in his triumph.
"There’s another thing. We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire."
"A fire! Make a fire!"
At once half the boys were on their feet. Jack clamored among them, the conch forgotten.
"Come on! Follow me!"
The space under the palm trees was full of noise and movement. Ralph was on his feet too, shouting for quiet, but no one heard him. All at once the crowd swayed toward the island and was gone— following Jack. Even the tiny children went and did their best among the leaves and broken branches. Ralph was left, holding the conch, with no one but Piggy.”

William Golding book Lord of the Flies

Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 2: Fire on the Mountain

Children, Mountain, Boy, Tree

“One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.”

Richard Russo book Straight Man

Source: Straight Man (1997), Ch. 2.

Marriage, Way, Communication, Failure

“We mean to explore kindness and its enormous silences.”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Calligrammes

Nous voulons explorer la bonté contrée énorme où tout se tait
"La jolie rousse" (The Pretty Redhead), line 26; p. 135.
Calligrammes (1918)

“I was shamed into helping the unborn after 12 years of silence, in 1986. Since then, my only client has been the unborn. I don't work for a movement. I don't work for a party. I don't work for candidates. I work for the unborn, and I don't give a flying flick about what people want to do on paper with bylaws, and all that kind of stuff, because it's just like the Pharisees, who had all their rules about the Sabbath, but they didn't know that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath! I will stand for the unborn, and I will not relent! I don't know Mr. Clymer, but Howard Phillips has lost ALL of my respect, because he stands for people who want to kill ONE, only ONE, innocent child, and that's all that counts! If you want ONE innocent child, GO with this man, but I'll tell you what- I've got my paperwork filled out. All it lacks is my signature, and my wife's signature, and we're the hell out of here, if you vote to stay with a national party that will put up with ONE dead baby, much less many thousands of dead babies. And you sir [pointing at Jim Clymer] need to repent! Because the blood will be on your hands when you stand before God. You won't be able to argue about procedural votes, and keeping the party together before God! You'll be standing there quaking in your boots, wishing you'd washed yourself in the blood of the Lamb. That's all I've got to say…The only thing that matters to me is doing my job to stop the killing of the unborn.”

Paul deParrie (1949–2006) American activist

The Last Words of Paul deParrie http://www.constitutionpartyoregon.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=111&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

God, People, Hell, Help

“Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her.”

Greg Bear (1951) American writer best known for science fiction

Source: Blood Music (1985), Chapter 20 (pp. 116-117)

Water

“I feel grateful to the happy chance which forced me to compose freely and in silence, and has thus delivered me from the tyranny of the fingers, so dangerous to thought.”

Hector Berlioz Mémoires

Je ne puis m'empêcher de rendre grâces au hasard qui m'a mis dans la nécessité de parvenir à composer silencieusement et librement, en me garantissant ainsi de la tyrannie des habitudes des doigts, si dangereuses pour la pensée.
On being unable to master the piano.
Source: Mémoires (1870), Ch. 4, p. 14

Feeling, Chance, Happiness

“She certainly gave me what I've been losing. Youth's intensity, its craving, the soul-priapism, huge lust and fierce to her, clamour for her to realize with me that mightiest marriage-dream, that Sacrament of Satan that may be consummated only beneath Night's dome, in utmost silence, because its Elements are not symbols of things, but They themselves.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: Magical Record of the Beast 666: The Diaries of Aleister Crowley 1914-1920 (1972), p. 193

Marriage, Youth, Dreams, Soul

“Silence is a great wisdom.”

Musa al-Kadhim (745–799) Seventh of the Twelve Imams and regarded by Sunnis as a renowned scholar

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 414.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

Wisdom

“It was good to be back in the wilderness again, where everything seems as peace. I was alone - just me and the animals. It was a great feeling - free once more to plan and do as I pleased. Beyond was all around me. My dream was a dream no longer. I suppose I was here because this was something I had to do - not just dream about it but do it. I suppose too I was here to test myself - not that I had never done it before but this time it was to be a more thorough and lasting examination. What was I capable of that I didn't know yet? Could I truly enjoy my own company for an entire year? And was I equal to everything this wild land could throw at me? I had seen its moods in late spring, summer, and early fall but what about the winter? Would I love the isolation then, with its bone-stabbing cold, its ghostly silence? At age 51, I intended to find out.”

Richard Proenneke (1916–2003) American hermit

Alone in the Wilderness DVD, Bob Swerer Productions
Paraphrase by Sam Keith for One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey Dick's exact words are not known.

Love, Age, Peace, Dreams

“The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.”

Basil Bunting (1900–1985) Poet

from "Villon" (1930)

Death, Sea, Forgetting

“You can try to put the lid on this group of people, but you will never silence us. You will never — you can shoot me in the head, you can shoot the next guy in the head, but there will be 10 others that line up. And it may not happen today, it may not happen next week, but freedom will be restored in this land. Period. And no matter what you want to call it, it is a totalitarian state that you're headed towards.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2009-09-08
Beck repeats call for prayers, claims, "You can shoot me in the head … but there will be 10 others that line up"
Media Matters for America
2009-09-08
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200909080013
2000s, 2009

People, Guy, Freedom

“Children of that age often fall downstairs, you did. Twice. You only worry if there's silence when they reach the bottom.”

John Gardner (British writer)

Gardner, John. The Werewolf Trace. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 1977.

Children, Age

“Silence never shows itself to so great an advantage, as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation, provided that we give no just occasion for them.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 133.
The Tatler (1711–1714)

“Dear Habicht, / Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble… / What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul…?”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Lieber Habicht! / Es herrscht ein weihevolles Stillschweigen zwischen uns, so daß es mir fast wie eine sündige Entweihung vorkommt, wenn ich es jetzt durch ein wenig bedeutsames Gepappel unterbreche... / Was machen Sie denn, Sie eingefrorener Walfisch, Sie getrocknetes, eingebüchstes Stück Seele...? <br class="br">Opening of a letter to his friend Conrad Habicht in which he describes his four revolutionary Annus Mirabilis papers (18 or 25 May 1905) Doc. 27 http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-doc/81?ajax <br class="br">1900s

Feeling, Soul

“Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

Time

“Well may we say "God save the Queen", because nothing will save the Governor-General! The Proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General's Official Secretary was countersigned "Malcolm Fraser," who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr's cur. They won't silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for the next few weeks … Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

On hearing the proclamation dismissing him from office, which ended with the previous official wording "God Save the Queen" which had been abolished by his government and unilaterally re-instated by David Smith, the Governor-General's Official Secretary, at that moment - the first of many changes undertaken by the so-called "caretaker" government.

Source: [Gough Whitlam dead: His memorable quotes, 21 October 2014, 2 May 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/national/gough-whitlam-dead-his-memorable-quotes-20141021-1193jd.html, Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au, Murphy, D]

God, Rage, Reading, History

“What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

The Powerbook (2000)

Love, Life, Pain, People

“Nor does it impose silence on this sex which does not deserve to be despised.”

François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797) French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period

N'impose pas non plus silence à ce sexe qui ne mérite pas qu'on le méprise.
[in Gracchus Babeuf avec les Egaux, Jean-Marc Shiappa, Les éditions ouvrières, 1991, 44, 27082 2892-7]
On women

Sex

“The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst—for me, at least—is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.”

Stephen King book Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993), Introduction

Books, Fear, Faith, Way

“Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

The Mother (1945)

Children, Forgetting

“Silence can shatter the trivialized deity that has occupied our imaginations and provide God the canvas to begin a new work in our souls.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

God, Soul, Imagination

“Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.”

Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) Italian dramatist and poet

Alta vendetta
D'alto silenzio è figlia.
La Congiura de' Pazzi, I, 1; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 707.

Daughters

“There are Republicans, friends of mine, that I talk to that are very concerned about what’s going on. It is not easy for a Republican to take on a president of their own party in the first thirty days. Don’t assume their silence today means they will be forever silent.
They haven’t moved to the place where I think is sufficient. But you are seeing some early signs here. I don’t want to predict that we’re all going to be kumbaya, Republicans and Democrats fighting the Trump administration on a daily basis but I think this is a very uncomfortable moment for a lot of Republicans.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

"2,000 turn out in West Hartford for Sen. Murphy town hall meeting" http://fox61.com/2017/02/21/overflow-crowd-in-west-hartford-for-sen-murphy-town-hall-meeting/, 21 February 2017.

Thinking, Fight

“Believers in psychic phenomena — such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis — appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition… What is unique about the present is, that during the last 15 years, scarcely a single scientific paper has appeared attacking the work of the parapsychologists.”

George R. Price (1922–1975) American population geneticist

Price, G.R. (1955). "Science and the supernatural". Science. 122 (3165). Aug, 26. p. 359–367

Decision, Appearance, Victory

“We were outside. The icy wind whipped my face. I was constantly biting my lips so that they wouldn't freeze. All around me, what appeared to be a dance of death. My head was reeling. I was walking through a cemetery. Among the stiffened corpses, there were logs of wood. Not a sound of distress, not a plaintive cry, nothing but mass agony and silence. Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death, Appearance, Help, Dance

“Don't you feel a change a coming
From another side of time,
Breaking down the walls of silence,
Lifting shadows from your mind.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Changes IV
Song lyrics, Teaser and the Firecat (1971)

Feeling, Change, Time

“I know what the power of silence is. When I used to play in clubs, everybody was loud; there was a lot of noise. So I would take my mute off the microphone, and I would play something so soft that you could hardly hear it… and you talk about listening. Roy Eldridge did that. He's one of my favorites.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

As quoted in Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, The Music, p. 40
1970s

“Silence is the winding-sheet of the past: it is sometimes impious, often dangerous to raise it. But even when it is raised piously and lovingly, the first moment is a cruel one.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book I, Note I, p. 18
Les confidences (1849)

Past

“Has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous? Or do they all have their importance, and must he present them one after the other, impartially, so that not a single one is left out, as in the inventory of a distraint? Unless the line of life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

Source: Honey Moon (1990), P. 36

Life

“Some say silence is golden, I choose noise.”

Blake Lewis (1981) American musician

[Blake Lewis' profile, http://myspace.com/blakelewis, 2007-06-04, MySpace]
["What Are You Doing This Weekend?: Bshorty Farewell Party with KJ Sawka + Ra Scion + Joe Doria", http://www.seattleweekly.com/music/blogs/reverb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend/, 2007-06-04, January 26, 2007, Seattle Weekly, Aja Pecknold]
On music

“I do not understand your silence you know all the same how interested I always am in what you are doing. you also know that there are not many of us who understand each other we have always got on well together. I have seen and I see every day how little people like us[. ] Between ourselves there are things we cannot say to others…. you cannot imagine how little I find myself in sympathy with other people….- I do not want to lose another day, one hour this year I have no hope I have lost it and you know how unlike me that is. at the moment I have several studies to do at the Louvre order[s] which are going to bring me many others [p. 2] as soon as this time has passed I want to do two large pictures for the Salon[. ] I think of nothing else… I am becoming more and more the Fantin of the old days you know here I am today but neither discouraged nor bored. I have my own views now nothing can distract me..”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris, July/September 1868, to James Whistler in London; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1085&nameid=Fantin_Latour_IH&sr=0&rs=76&surname=&firstname= - System Number: 01085; Call Number: MS Whistler F 16.

People, Hope, Imagination, Understanding

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

Archibald Macleish (1892–1982) American poet and Librarian of Congress

As quoted in Richard Nixon's First Inaugural Address (20 January 1969)
Attributed

Beauty

“You don't need to do nation building in Israel, we're already built. You don't need to export democracy to Israel, we've already got it. You don't need to send American troops to Israel, we defend ourselves… Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East, Israel is what is right about the Middle East… The tyranny in Tehran brutalizes its own people. It supports attacks against American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. It subjugates Lebanon and Gaza. It sponsors terror worldwide… A nuclear-armed Iran would ignite a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. It would give terrorists a nuclear umbrella. It would make the nightmare of nuclear terrorism a clear and present danger throughout the world. I want you to understand what this means. They could put the bomb anywhere. They could put it on a missile. It could be on a container ship in a port, or in a suitcase on a subway… Now the threat to my country cannot be overstated. Those who dismiss it are sticking their heads in the sand. Less than seven decades after six million Jews were murdered, Iran's leaders deny the Holocaust of the Jewish people, while calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Leaders who spew such venom, should be banned from every respectable forum on the planet. But there is something that makes the outrage even greater: The lack of outrage. In much of the international community, the calls for our destruction are met with utter silence. It is even worse because there are many who rush to condemn Israel for defending itself against Iran's terror proxies… When we say never again, we mean never again! Israel always reserves the right to defend itself… In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace… No distortion of history can deny the four thousand year old bond, between the Jewish people and the Jewish land… Peace cannot be imposed. It must be negotiated. But it can only be negotiated with partners committed to peace.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Address to joint meeting of the U.S. Congress http://www.c-span.org/video/?299666-1/israeli-prime-minister-netanyahu-address-joint-meeting-congress (24 May 2011). <br class="br">2010s, 2011, Address to joint meeting of the U.S. Congress (May 2011)

God, People, World, Peace

“Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Afterword (1984)

Books, Change

“Everyone who is grieved at anything, or discontented, is like a pig for sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like a dove for sacrifice is he who laments in silence. Our one distinction is that it is given to us to consent, if we will, to the necessity imposed upon us.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 2, Ch. 2
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)

“Silence is a fence around wisdom.”

Maimónides (1138–1204) rabbi, physician, philosopher

Source: Hilkhot De'ot (Laws Concerning Character Traits), Chapter 2, Section 5, p. 33

Wisdom

“Nothing builds authority up like silence, splendor of the strong and shelter of the weak.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

Rien ne rehausse l'autorité mieux que le silence, splendeur des forts et refuge des faibles.
in Le Fil de l'épée.
Writings

Strong

“He has embarrassed the government. By continuing as minister without portfolio he has earned himself a price for silence.”

Arun Jaitley (1952–2019) Indian politician

Calling for the resignation of Natwar Singh who was accused of corruption, as quoted in " Indian foreign minister removed http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4414504.stm", BBC News (7 November 2005)

“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

Feeling

“My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

The Paris Review interview (1984)

Death

“By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs.
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers. Now he is scattered over a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Source: In Memory of W.B. Yeats (1939), Lines 10–23

Death, Feeling, Dead, Happiness

“We have a moral duty to offer support and safety to LGBT people fleeing repression for which Britain shares responsibility…. It is now Pride season in Britain. Members of the government will wrap themselves in the helped construct anti-gay laws across the globe that still endure today. The victims of such persecution need our support. Instead, they are being terrorised. It is a national scandal – and the silence over it must end.”

Owen Jones (writer)

The government’s treatment of gay refugees shames Britain https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/07/lgbt-rights-deportation-gay-lesbian-refugees (7 June 2018), '.

People, Law, Support, Help

“true love is like religion, it hath its silence and its sanctity.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love, Religion

“I was borne on an eagle's wing,
Till with the noon-sun perishing;
Then I stood in a world alone,
From which all other life was gone,
Whence warmth, and breath, and light were fled,
A world o'er which a curse was said:
The trees stood leafless all, and bare,
The sky spread, but no sun was there:
Night came, no stars were on her way,
Morn came without a look of day,—
As night and day shared one pale shroud,
Without a colour or a cloud.
And there were rivers, but they stood
Without a murmur on the flood,
Waveless and dark, their task was o'er,—
The sea lay silent on the shore,
Without a sign upon its breast
Save of interminable rest:
And there were palaces and halls,
But silence reign'd amid their walls,
Though crowds yet fill'd them; for no sound
Rose from the thousands gather'd round;
All wore the same white, bloodless hue,
All the same eyes of glassy blue,
Meaningless, cold, corpse-like as those
No gentle hand was near to close.
And all seem'd, as they look'd on me,
In wonder that I yet could be
A moving shape of warmth and breath
Alone amid a world of death.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto III
The Troubadour (1825)

Life, Death, World, Way

“Silence is closer
We're passing ships in the night.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

"I Sat By the Ocean", ...Like Clockwork (2013)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age

Night

“Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman's clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriétaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, 'Trois. Mari et deux frères,' as he set down their salads.This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”

Ian McEwan book Black Dogs

Page 164-165.
Black Dogs (1992)

Love, Life, Death, War

“Why do we weep in grief,' the aunt wondered. 'Dogs, deer, birds sufferent with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.”

Annie Proulx book The Shipping News

Source: The Shipping News (1993), P. 24

Dogs, Bird, Suffering, Animals

“Coming to the farm from Worcester, where Coloured people seem to have to beg for whatever they get, he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk. Each morning, his uncle confers with his two men about the day's tasks. He does not give them orders. Instead he proposes the tasks that need to be done, as if dealing cards on a table; his men deal their own cards too. In between, there are pauses, long, reflective silences in which nothing happens.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

Boyhood (1998)

Men, People

“Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.”

Erica Jong book Fear of Flying

Fear of Flying (1973)

“To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence — this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Bk. VII, Ch. 5
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)

People

“Either be silent or say something better than silence.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 960
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

“What voice revisits me this night? What face
To my heart’s room returns?
From the perpetual silence where the grace
Of human sainthood burns
Hastes he once more to harmonise and heal?
I know not. Only I feel
His influence undiminished
And his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

Collected Poems (1949), Revisitation

Life, Feeling, Heart, Night

“When we had been in Ashenstovo [1873, located near the Prussian border]] a few days my mother took us children to see a famous Polish church, Kostjol, famous for its miraculous Madonna icon. This icon had three precious coats, one of gold, one of coral and one with pearls and diamonds... Many peasant men and women were were lying prostrate on the floor as if crucified, with their arms outstretched. It was very quiet. Suddenly a great blare of trumpets shattered the silence. Terribly frightened I saw the gold curtain open and the Madonna appear wearing a gold robe.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

from his 'Memories', in 'Catalogue Raisonné of the oil Paintings', ed. Maria Jawlensky, Angelica Jawlensky and Lucia Pieroni-Jawlensky; published resp. in 1991, 1992, 1993
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p.274

Women, Men, Children, Lying