Quotes About Silence

She wants very badly for her father to say, Yes, that's it absolutely, ma chérie, but he says nothing.

the whisper of space being compressed.

Silence is the fruit of occupation.

Is it dawn? She climbs the ladder and presses her ear to the trapdoor. No more sirens. Maybe the house burned

Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.

The quiet is fretful, unnatural.

The city seems utterly still, as though everyone is listening, waiting for someone to slip.

Beyond the broken window hangs a windless night. Ashes swirling in starlight.

she'd left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater

A moment like this--the four of them around the table under the sad, dusty kitchen lamp--could never accommodate all the things she had to say.

He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.

Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything else. The stillness of a tree. Of a mouse blinking in the dark.

Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?

If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. ... So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

Volkheimer's eyes open as wide as they can. Straining the blackness for every stray photon. A single piano runs up scales. Then back down. He listens to the notes and the silences between them, and then finds himself leading horses through a forest at dawn, trudging through snow behind his great-grandfather, who walks with a saw draped over his huge shoulders, the snow squeaking beneath boots and hooves, all the trees above them whispering and creaking.

when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said.

They walk several more minutes in silence, Rex slowing with each step, and soon they are at the edge of Camp Five. Woodsmoke, a rumbling generator, the Chinese flag. The reek of the latrines. All around them the little hunched trees whisper. Zeno can see a darkness seize Rex, then slowly release him. "I know why those librarians read the old stories to you," Rex says. "Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.

Static static static static static.

Ca inchipuiti mai sunt oamenii! De ce sa te obosesti sa compui muzica daca tacerea si vantul sunt mai cuprinzatoare? De ce sa aprinzi lampi daca intunericul, inevitabil, le va stinge?

Los sordos pueden oír los latidos de su propio corazón, frau Elena?

Can deaf people hear their heartbeat?

They would not get closer to the truth that night. They watched a period of hockey in silence. Winkler insisted on doing the dishes. Herman insisted on driving him to the bus stop.

The wheeling of the night on its silent trunnions.

Maybe it's that Italy has become familiar enough that I can stop paying attention to it for a few hours a day. Or maybe it's just being back in the country, a place so much more similar to home, where men go for long walks in the hills and people wave to you when you drive past and the background noise is not engines but silence.