Quotes About Silence

Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged.

He said nothing to any of them, and they knew better than to speak to the captain when he stood thus, deep in thought. He had a problem. He'd settle it without help from any of them. That was what captains did.

I told myself that I clenched my lips shut because it was the nobler thing to do, to keep these secrets to myself was better than to let the truth destroy her. Did I lie to myself, then? Don't we all?

And somehow by not speaking out on his own behalf, he made it impossible for anyone else to object.

She felt silence growing in her. Sometimes it reminded her of a fast-growing ivy; silence covered her and cloaked her, and she suspected that one day she would smother in the silences Hest could create. It was an effort to break through that strangling quiet, but she did it.

by all the lies I had ever spoken and all the truths I had made into lies by leaving them unspoken.

Mas acima de tudo, o estrondoso silêncio no meu coração, onde durante tanto tempo a consciência de Olhos-de-Noite fora um farol constante na minha escuridão, um calor no meu inverno, uma estrela guia na minha noite.

She loved to talk. All I need do was provide the silence.

Then silence, save for the rain thundering on the roof and splatting on the innyard mud. Silence, save for the soft crackling of the fire, and the distant music from the common room below. Silence but for unsteady footsteps making their way past our door. But most of all, the crashing silence in my heart where for so long Nighteyes' awareness had been a steady beacon in my darkness, a warmth in my winter, a guide star in my night.

Better to regret unsaid words than repent of words I could never call back.

I just sat, feeling something inside me go very still. I hoped it was my heart.

With Katharine, it seems, words are only her secondary means of communication.

But the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 1 KINGS 19:11–12

Churches are political even when they refuse to act politically, because silence is a form of complicity and thus an endorsement of the status quo.

The American home has become the noisiest place of utter silence on earth.

And I think it's often very hard for close friends to understand that sometimes you want them to be there but you don't have to say anything, that their presence is as powerful as anything else.

But the best part of the evening was that there were whole hours when we sat around the fire pit and didn't say a word. We were together as a group, but they knew I needed silence. That can be very hard for friends.

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear.

What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore? How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again.

What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn't you dance it? Wouldn't you act it out? Wouldn't your every movement tell the story? In time you would be so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives.

In this day and age, we all talk too much and hear too little. Listening has become a forgotten art that the world is sorely missing

Great griefs are mute.

Dove parlano tamburi, tacciono le leggi. Where drums beat, laws are silent. An