Quotes About Voice

Find a voice in a whisper.

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

Living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation, some ghetto dwellers now and then strike out in spasms of violence and self-defeating riots. A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.

As I went through this period one night I picked up an article entitled The Children of Vietnam, and I read it. And after reading that article, I said to myself, Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands and thousands of little children in Vietnam. I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

L'émeute est le langage de celui qui n'est pas entendu.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.

mayor, sounding

Are not the forest fringes wet with tears? Is not the voice of all regret Breaking out of the dark earth's heart? She too, she too, has loved and lost; and though She turned last night in disdain Away from the sunset-embers, From her soul she can never depart; She can never depart from her pain. Vainly she strives to forget; Beautiful in her woe, She awakes in the dawn and remembers.

I like your voice. That sounds ridiculously lame, I know. But when you cannot see, Miss Fry, sound and the other senses become far more acute. Normally one likes the look of someone to whom one feels attracted. I like the sound of your voice.

sat in the window with the volume in my hand, but my thoughts were far from the daring speculations of the writer. My mind ran upon our late visitor – her smiles, the deep rich tones of her voice, the strange mystery which overhung her life. If she were seventeen at the time of her father's disappearance she must be seven-and-twenty now – a sweet

There is really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

the end of the day we're all animals. We need to be shown our pee ell a see ee. A little clarity will go a long way towards helping all the concerned parties. You will be doing her a favour for which she will, one day, be grateful. Believe me, I speak from experience.' R.C. often dropped his voice mid-sentence and spelled out random words, as though he was hoodwinking an imaginary eavesdropper who didn't know how to spell.

We have free speech. Maybe. But do we have Really Free Speech? If what we have to say doesn't "sell," will we still say it? Can we? Or is everybody looking for Things That Sell to say?

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing / you are not being heard / noticed only by others / not heard for the same reason.

what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

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?

To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin's blister? My father leaves his psychic print upon me, silent, intense, and unforgiving. But his is a distant lightning. Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.