Quotes about silence

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“My feelings for you shame me into silence.”

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star…”

“I ejaculated about ten minutes ago and the stuff was black. So everything is not normal."

Silence greeted that happy little announcement. Man, if he had hauled off and sucker-punched V, he would have gotten less of a shocked-out reaction.”

“Keep your secrets
Keep your silence
It is a better gift than truth”

“Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken.”

“To many women mistake a man's hostility for wit and his silence for depth.”

“Let us have the luxury of silence.”

“Silence can mock.”

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”

“He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”

“I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.”

“Even God used silence as a strategy.”

“But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.”

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.”

“Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

“I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

“I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.”

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence.
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose or if it be your wish to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
as the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing”

“You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.”

“I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.”

“dissonance, n.

Nights when I need to sleep and you can't. Days when I want to talk to you and you won't. Hours when every noise you make interferes with my silence. Weeks when there is a buzzing in the air, and we both pretend we don't here it.”

“I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.”

“But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.”

“The tongue may be an unruly member--
But silence poisons the soul.”

“And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.”

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

“Everything was so quiet, as if the silence was listening.”

“I suck,” I said, after several minutes of uncomfortable silence into our drive.
“Is that some kind of vampire joke?” Trey
asked.”

“Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”

“Give me silence, water, hope
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.”

“the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.”

“The flames surround me, and I feel myself slipping further from life, thinning to only the faintest shiver in the air. I yearn for the darkness and silence of the underworld, where I can rest.”

“But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.”

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.”

“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.”

“I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.”

“A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.”

“Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on.”

“To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.”

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence”

“When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response.
The gray area between yes and no.
Silence.”

“I have learned that trying again is important and decisivness is good.

I have learned that silence hurts.

I have learned about starting over
and releasing pride.”

“Silence is safe.”

“He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs…”

“Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.”

“… it was better to answer, no matter how ineptly, thank to withhold a reply. Because sometimes silence could wound someone nearly as badly as a bullet.”

“All my years to this moment
All my roads to this wall.
All my words to this silence
All my pride to this fall.
-Songs of Sapphique”

“Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness.”

“May my silences become more accurate.”

“A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”

“Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything.”

“Silence isn't golden and it surely doesn't mean consent, so start practicing the art of communication.”

“Her silence was worth more to her than a thousand words. In that silence, she had peace and clarity. Except during the night, when her own jumbled thoughts would keep her awake.”

“Silence, and then Eve said, "Okay, that was extra creepy, with whipped creepy topping. And this is me, changing my mind.”

“… this time I didn't launch into my usual tirade. Was it a memory of Krishna, the cool silence with which he countered disagreement, that stopped me? I saw something I hadn't realized before: words wasted energy.”

“Silence is so freaking loud”

“I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.”

“My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.”

“I hope the snow covers everything so all the footsteps are silenced, and the whole city can be at peace.”

“The silence was always the greates temptation.”

“… it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.”

“Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.”

“There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.”

“It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.”

“The silence was an intense roar.”

“her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give.”

“Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.”

“My mom told me that I should trust the man who could see the sorrow behind my smile, the love behind my anger, and the reasons behind my silence.”

“Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.”

“The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.”

“and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.”

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”

“The silence wasn't uncomfortable or hostile but exhausted--the quiet of people who have a great deal to think about but not a hell of a lot to say.”

“Dawn was coming. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.”

“Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.”
Qui tacet non utique fatetur, sed tamen verum est eum non negare.

“So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.”

“A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.”

“All my life I've learned to suffer in silence.”

“Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.”

“The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

“But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.”

“and I wondered if, in the end, this is how all disputes are settled, with a shared silence as things become equal. You take something from me, I take something from you. We all want balance, one way or another.”

“Silence is argument carried out by other means.”

“Noise is relative to the silence preceeding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the peoples voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.”

“That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”

“Silence was pleased.”

“Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.”

“When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.”

“Sometimes ah think that people become junkies just because they subconsiously crave a wee bit ay silence.”

“When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.”

“Your very silence shows you agree.”

“For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.”

“There was something about our silence that made me comfortable. He wasn't talking to me, but I didn't feel ignored. I felt we were part of the same moment, and it didn't need to be defined.”

“You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.”

“In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.”

“I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced”

“The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit with out speaking. This is the great paradox.”