Quotes About Silence

She had told me often enough to keep my mouth shut, and now I did exactly that. I abolished all language on the day of my father's funeral.

Shut up and do not think. All the theorists agree: shut up and keep the words from being said. And all of the scars will remain invisible; and all of the scars will remain under the skin. Where they belong.

Language was everything. Trust was for fools. Love came and went. Words could be stolen.

She raged at a world that would allow such injustice to occur. How could the rural, verdant beauty all around her be the domain of such cruelty, a place in which the larks chattered despite the dangers they faced, unable to keep silent as they sang the praises of the sky.

I thought perhaps it was more important to listen than to be heard.

He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent.

With his words, he could approach the soul where it resided, a glory to God, for words were what the Almighty first created, after the silence of the world, and they were Eleazar ben Ya'ir's gift as well.

Where did he take you?" she asked. She had wanted to ask this question for four years. It had taken that long for the words to come out. Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow.

Some people believe that if you don't open your eyes to sorrow and you don't talk about it, you can pretend it never happened.

We mourned in silence so that we would not curse the world we walked through. I saw owls in the locust trees and wondered if these creatures were the spirits of the dead, for there were so many murdered in our homeland there was not room enough for all of their ghosts. I half-believed they had turned into birds instead.

if a person doesn't speak her mind she will carry her resentment until it burns her

There are so many ways to stop the knowing, and I tried them all. I tried silence, I tried heroin, I tried calling it love. And then I stopped trying to call my dumbness any one of ten thousand names.

We were no different from the doves above us. We could not speak or cry, but when there was no choice, we discovered we could fly. If you want a reason, take this: We yearned for our portion of the sky (p.397).

She never told anyone what he did to her on a nightly basis because she was afraid of him, but also because she was worth nothing to herself.

I heard the voice of God all around me, but I was unafraid. I should have trembled before the Almighty and hid myself from sight. I should have taken a knife to my own flesh to cut away the mark of my past deeds. But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

He must be an idiot to feel this way, but there's nothing he can do. He doesn't even know if he can manage to speak.

Há segredos que devem ser guardados e a maioria deles tem relação com as angústias do coração humano, pois a tristeza expressada em voz alta é uma tristeza vivida duas vezes.

Don't you tell your father a thing," she'd warn me. "It would kill him. You'd do better if you kept your mouth shut.

Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow.

Why should you not speak to me / And why should I not speak to you?

With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.

Now, as the labor began, it was the storm she recalled. The thrash of wind and trees and the quiet terror that had kept her flat in her bed, wide awake, anticipating disaster but unable to rise to avert it—or to shake her husband, to call for help. There was only silence now, in the small living room. There

And then the wind paused completely, as it will in April, a sudden silence and maybe even the hint of warmth from the sun, so

No longer to be compelled to betray one's own feelings and senses, no longer to allow oneself to be deflected from the truth of facts by ideologies of any kind, is already to lend a hand in the demolition of the inhuman, destructive wall of silence—the wall that we were forced to respect as children and which has again and again resulted in fascist behavior.