Quotes About Silence

Profound silence would brood over the valley, even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her

Reckless talk costs lives.

They will want answers. Then they'll want silence.

When meditating one dwells in the empty, silent no-thing-ness from which mental phenomena arise; when thoughts and images appear one lets them go.

Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight," Havel wrote, "which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in each case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.

A great hope fell You heard no noise The ruin was within Oh cunning wreck that told no tale And let no witness in…. A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my life had entered it And there was room beside…

No one responds or even looks at him. It's as if he didn't say it. If an accountant says words in a kitchen and no one listens, did he make a sound?

Of course, we can't ask them, because murder victims are notoriously tight-lipped.

Strange things are happening here in the United States of America, right now, that are so troubling it is almost hard to believe they are occurring. Your taxpayer money is going toward these things. And your silence and/or apathy is tacit approval, not only in my eyes but in the eyes of the government.

For some moments in life, there are no words.

If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?

At a certain pitch of religious experience, the heart just wants to sing; it breaks into song. Paradoxically, you could say when the silence finds its fullness, it comes to word.

In the history of the AIDS epidemic, President Reagan's legacy is one of silence,

Silence is a form of consent, and I just couldn't let the evil popular picture of David and our community stand without trying to combat it.

True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz? zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

And after you were up, when the light had come and the moon had gone, you found the path again waiting through the open window, the faces at the table gazing with you, as you sat with your coffee, silently letting the sense of rest seat home, the body ready to walk, in rhythm and in rhyme, with the given, unspoken source.

In the silence that follows a great line you can feel Lazarus deep inside even the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you, lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

One day I will say the gift I once had has been taken, the place I have made for myself belongs to another, and the words I have sung are being sung by the ones I would want. Then I will be ready for that voice and the still silence in which it arrives. And if my faith is good then we'll meet again on the road and we'll be thirsty, and stop and laugh and drink together again from the deep well of things as they are. ...

It is exhausting living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.

If silence equals death, he taught us, then art equals language equals life.

If silence equals death, then art equals language equals life." —David Wojnarowicz

We moved in silence for a moment and I said, "How did we screw this all up so badly, John?" He shook his head. "We always find a way.