logo

Quotes About Silence

we laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Usamos una serie de teatrales señas con las manos para comunicar lo que un simple susurro habría hecho con la misma eficacia. Pero hemos hecho voto de silencio: ni una palabra hasta que estemos a salvo, de camino a casa.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
I don't speak," he wrote, "I'm sorry.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
The ground is still filled iwth rings, and money, and pictures, and Jewish things. I was only able to find a few of them, but they fill the earth. The hero did not ask me once what she was saying. I am not certain if he knew what she was saying, or if he knew not to inquire.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself, and the world was the world, so I was silent.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Did she feel pity for me, did she want me to suffer? The next morning she led me to the coat closet, which faces the living room, she went in with me, we were in there all day, although she knew he wouldn't come until the afternoon, it was too small, we needed more space between us, we needed Nothing Places, she said "This is what it's felt like, except you weren't here." We looked at each other in silence for hours.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning . . .
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad's last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
The longer your mother and I lived together, the more we took each other's assumptions for granted, the less was said, the more misunderstood.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
there's going to come a time when we won't speak for days on end." "There won't." "There will. Every parent thinks it will never happen to them, but it happens to everyone.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
In de stiltes tussen de ogenblikken sijpelden de jaren weg.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
I couldn't explain to her that I missed him more, more than she or anyone else missed him, because I could't tell her about what happened with the phone. That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
But he didn't say anything, and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld, but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
They have a notion, that when people are met together, a short silence does much improve conversation: this I found to be true; for during those little intermissions of talk, new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the discourse.
~ Jonathan Swift
There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.
~ Joni Mitchell
The Suicide Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
No hables a menos que puedas mejorar el silencio.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Hay una hora de la tarde en que la llanura está por decir algo; nunca lo dice o tal vez lo dice infinitamente y no lo entendemos, o lo entendemos pero es intraducible, como una música
~ Jorge Luís Borges
I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Não fale, a menos que você possa aprimorar o silêncio.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Es fama entre los etíopes que los monos deliberadamente no hablan para que no los obliguen a trabajar
~ Jorge Luís Borges