Quotes About Silence

In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In

we live in a world of corpses, and only about some of them is there a hue and cry. True

I don't mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart; the same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn't a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they're not in the sky

And then again, maybe it was some weird noise in my brother's head, some little digital murmur he never told anyone about. I've heard about that – how you wake up one day and there's like this permanent dial tone droning somewhere behind the meat in your head, a little Dustbuster trapped where the brain saves you from going crazy. After a while you wind up ending it all just to make things quiet again.

No one answered. You could hear the light buzzing over us. I love that sound. It means school isn't working, that the teachers are losing the battle.

In my defense I have only silence, dew on the grass, a nightingale among the branches. You forgive it, its long tenure in the leaves of one aspen after another, drops of eternity, grams of amazement, and the sleepy complaints of the poor poets

There is nothing more peaceful than New York City at three A.M. It's the rest period before the madness begins at dawn.

How fain I'd speak to those who know mythought, And silence keep to those who yet know nought.

Wise men say nothing in dangerous times

My parents sleep like children in the dark I am too far to hear them breathe

He moved his fingers down her whole spine, one by one by one, and during the time it took to do that, his brain remained absolutely quiet. It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened; before you find yourself, at the base of her spine, different.

He said he hated talking and just wanted to look into my eyes and tell me things that way. I let him and it made my skin lift, the things in his look.

She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. "Someone else should speak instead," he said. "If I don't speak, it means someone else will," which did not always turn out to be true.

Strengthening the mind is not done by making it move around as is done to strengthen the body, but by bringing the mind to a halt, bringing it to rest.

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one, a silence with an attractive one leaves you certain it is you who are impossibly dull.

We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.

Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn't ring, he isn't asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through cowardly inaction.

prayer is when night descends over thought

What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.

Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard. During

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn't ring, he isn't asked out, nothing new happens. For must of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize, at last, that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly, through cowardly inaction.