Quotes About Silence

The dead of midnight is the noon of thought.

We sit in silence, drinking hot chocolate and contemplating the act that death is a monstrous affront to the living and shouldn't be allowed.

I should meet many people who do not know anyone personally who has been raped or molested as a child. But I can't remember seeing a newspaper without a rape or molestation charge in it somewhere, and when I ask groups how many people know someone personally with a history of molestation, almost always, every hand in the room goes up.

Once, back then, a young riverman had even publicly cursed the camp. He was immediately arrested and locked up in the camp for several weeks so that he saw firsthand what was going on inside there. When he got out, he looked strange and didn't answer a single question people asked him. He eventually found work on a barge, and later, his relatives said, he moved to Holland for good—a story that astounded the entire village back then.

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.

Darkness was already coming down like a cloak on the deserted streets,

You do not feel like dancing and there are no daffodils, only walls, your bedroom door, and the quiet of the house, tucked asleep in the night's thick cover. You wait for dawn. You wait for your dreams. You wait in the night, and you hunger.

The best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch swing with, never say a word, and then walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you've ever had.

I vowed to remain quiet, to finish what I'd started, sending Jimmy to school. He would graduate in three months, then I would insist that we leave. I would carry out my part of the bargain and I would not lose Jimmy. And so we did move to San Francisco; my husband sent me through college, where I learned, among other things, about being a class traitor. I went my own way, away from him, and threw myself into the struggles of my generation, determined never to forsake my class again.

has unnerved that part of the population that prefers unity and homogeneity. Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.

Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle in

You have learned well,* Dragon said. *But heed me, little one. You must guard the webs you weave that make dreams into flesh. Many beings will cherish those webs because they are spun out of magic that lives in the heart. But there will be others who will want to destroy that heart-magic before it can touch the world. Guard the webs . . . Weaver of Dreams.* Dragon's breath came out in a long sigh . . . and then there was silence.

You're not going to answer, are you?" Jaenelle asked after a minute of teeth-grinding silence. "No." "Don't you know the answer?" "Whether I know the answer or not is beside the point. It's not something a man discusses with a young girl." "But you know the answer." Daemon growled.

I love the silent hour of night, For blissful dreams may then arise, Revealing to my charmed sight What may not bless my waking eyes.

You may have as many words as you please -- only I can't stay to hear them.

A wise man keeps secrets in his heart a foolish man tells tales.

Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.

I am a restrained person. Otherwise my heart would race past my tongue to pour out everything. Instead I mumble, I gnaw myself. I lose hope. And my mind is burning.

at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.

There is a loneliness that fills the plain. Total. Lunar.

Note that the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.

He / thought of women. / What is it like to be a woman / listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence / stretches between them like geothermal pressure. / Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as / lava. She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can / move as slow as / nine hours per inch. [...] She wonders if / he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep / listening.

Time as hunger. Time passing and gazing. Time as perseverance. Mountain time. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.