Quotes about silence
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“All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“the beautiful are found in the edge of a room
crumpled into spiders and needles and silence
and we can never understand why they
left, they were so
beautiful.

they dont make it,
the beautiful die young
and leave the ugly to their ugly lives.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Beauty, Understanding

“Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets,. Hear it? It's a love song.

For whom?

You are loved.”

David Foster Wallace book Girl with Curious Hair

Source: Girl with Curious Hair

Love

“Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Men

“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 without speaking. This is the great
paradox.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

People, Drawing

“Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Sea, Night

“Silence creates its own violence.”

Jeff VanderMeer book Annihilation

Source: Annihilation

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied sould of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way to say a little is often to tell more than to say.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Way, Feeling

“The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness.”

Ariel Gore (1970) American writer

Source: Atlas of the Human Heart

People, World, Learning

“Silence is more eloquent than words.”

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

“To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Paris From My Window (1944)

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

Simone Weil book Waiting for God

Source: Waiting for God

Soul, Imagination, Light, Parting

“Not only will we have to repent for the sins of bad people; but we also will have to repent for the appalling silence of good people.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Variant: 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.

People

“Silence & smile are two powerful tools. Smile is the way to solve many problems & Silence is the way to avoid many problems.”

Iris Johansen (1938) Novelist

For Men, Smile, Way, Problem

“I think they have compatible silences.”

David Levithan Boy Meets Boy

Source: Boy Meets Boy

Thinking

“So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Lie, Time

“My love, I fear the silence of your hands.”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Love, Fear

“It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.”

Muriel Spark book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Source: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“Study is the child of silence and mystery.”

Henri Murger (1822–1861) novelist and poet from France

Source: The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter: Scenes de la Vie de Boheme

Study

“Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.”

Toni Morrison Love

Source: Love

Beauty, Help

“We fell into silence, both of us keeping our own secrets of what we'd suffered in the other's absence. I wondered if we were trying to protect each other or simply didn't want to admit to our own fears and weaknesses.”

Richelle Mead book Silver Shadows

Source: Silver Shadows

Secret, Fear, Suffering

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Attributed to Bonhoeffer on the Internet, and supposedly from Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy http://books.google.com/books?id=aG0q3X8TVpsC&pg=PA486#v=onepage (2010) by Eric Metaxas; however, there is no actual reference in that book. However, in advertising the book Metaxas does state on his site that the quote is from Bonhoeffer. http://ericmetaxas.com/books/bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy/ First attributed to Bonhoeffer in Explorations 12:1 (1998), p. 3, as referenced by James Cone (2004) Theology's Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy, Black Theology, 2:2, 139-152, footnote 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/blth.2.2.139.36027 <br class="br">Compare "Not to Act, is to Act!" by Francis W. McPeek http://www.ergo-sum.net/pics/McPeek.jpg, The Missionary Herald at Home and Abroad, v.141-142 (1945-1946), "Missionary herald, 1945 - Congregational churches," pp.34-35 (We must realize that church inaction is a form of political action, and it is altogether negative. “Not to act, is to act.”) <br class="br">Misattributed

God, Evil

“Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Wisdom, Season

“my hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best
for me.”

Charles Bukowski book Love Is a Dog from Hell

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

World, Heart, Dead

“The truth is, when it gets really quiet, when the silence gets too loud, i really start to miss everyone.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Truth

“Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Question, Thinking

“There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Beauty

“My Guardian is the Planet of Silence. Soldier Of Death and Rebirth Sailor Saturn! - Hotaru as Sailor Saturn”

Naoko Takeuchi (1967) Japanese manga artist

Death

“In these silences, something may rise”

Stephen King book Desperation

Source: Desperation (1996)

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.”

Harvey Fierstein (1954) actor from the United States

Deep, Life, Life

“Secret guilt by silence is betrayed.”

John Dryden book The Hind and the Panther

Pt. III, line 763.
The Hind and the Panther (1687)

Secret

“Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,
she slowly closed out of sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Source: Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt

Love, Dreams, Time, Forgetting

“I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.”

Francis Spufford (1964) British writer

Source: The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

Reading, Housing

“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence… Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.”

Franz Kafka book The Silence of the Sirens

"The Silence of the Sirens" (October 1917)

Singing

“Sighs and silences and avoided conversations are just as important as the things you do talk about.”

Cecelia Ahern book If You Could See Me Now

Source: If You Could See Me Now

“He wondered if normalcy was something, like vision or silence, you didn't realize was precious until you lost it.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

“In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

When We Two Parted (1808), st. 4.
Context: In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.

Secret, Heart, Forgetting

“… the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Tear, Heart

“The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.”

Rebecca Solnit book Men Explain Things To Me

Source: Men Explain Things to Me

“Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
… On the other hand, he SAID it.”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States

Source: Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

“Silence is better than unmeaning words.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in Encyclopaedia Americana (1832) Vol. X, p. 445 edited by Francis Lieber, E. Wigglesworth, and Thomas Gamaliel Bradford

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

Sadness, Time

“But as i lay there, it only seemes like silence filling my ears. And the thing was, it was so freaking loud.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

“most people are perfectly afraid of silence”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

People

“Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Stupidity, Time

“However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Variant: There are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
Source: Infidel

Time

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”

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

Truth, Thinking, Time

“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard […]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

God

“In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

When We Two Parted (1808), st. 4.

Secret, Tear, Heart, Forgetting

“If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Imagination, Thinking, Training, Despair

“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

Pain, Question, Solitude

“The referee told me this league has never had a brawl of that magnitude," said Mr. Penderwick after a long, painful silence. "Of course, at the time I was pretending to be a casual passerby and not a father at all.”

Jeanne Birdsall (1951) American children's writer

Source: The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

Pain, Time

“What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

In an interview with Carol Rittner and Sandra Meyers in Courage To Care - Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, NYU Press, 1986, p. 2. Also quoted by Yad Vashem http://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/about-the-program.html and Nicholas Kristoff in The Silence of the Bystanders https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/the-silence-of-bystanders.html, New York Times (March 19, 2006). <br class="br">Source: Night

Hurtful, Hurt