Marcel Marceau quote: “Music and silence… combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

“There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always.
If the music dies down there is a silence.
Almost the same as the movement of music.
To know silence perfectly is to know music.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Source: Good Morning, America

“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”

Thomas Merton book No Man Is an Island

Source: No Man Is an Island

“The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

“Silence more musical than any song.”

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet

Sonnet. Rest; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.”

Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) American poet

Speech of Love.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

As quoted in Reader's Digest Vol. 111, No. 666, (October 1977)

“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"The Rest is Silence"
Source: Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

“…the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Hands of the Father
Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867)

“I have known silence: the cold earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

Letter to his fiancée Lee, (31 July 1978), published in Gerald Durrell: An Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting (1999)
Context: I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.
I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. … I have known silence: the cold earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.
I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. … I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills fling home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their winds smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things… but —
All this I did without you. This was my loss.
All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.
All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

“Music and silence… combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

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Marcel Marceau 13

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