Quotes About Silence

I did not give him a straight answer, because saying what you really want out loud brings bad luck, and then the good thing will never happen. It might not happen anyway, but just to make sure, you should be careful about saying what you want or even wanting anything, as you may be punished for it.

I opened myself to your silences.

I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except

No reply is in itself a reply.

however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

It's wonderful to hear his voice, even if she can't depend on having any sort of a conversation with him. His interventions tend to be one-sided: if she answers him, he doesn't often answer back. But it was always more or less like that between them.

While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it.

there's often more in silences than in what is actually said – in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight.

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I'd pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said.

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

She is dying because she said. She is dying for the sake of the word. It is her body, silent and fingerless, writing this poem.

I long for periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythyms of transience as if into bed.

Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it's this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people The knock comes at my door. Cora, with the tray.

These words are yours, though you never said them, you never heard them, history breeds death but if you kill it you kill yourself.

There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak. Yes, we are very happy, I murmur. I have to say something. What else can I say?

listen. the leaves no longer rustle, the wind no longer sighs, our hearts no longer beat. They've fallen silent. Fallen, as if into the earth. Or is it we who have fallen? Perhaps it's not the world that is soundless but we who are dear. What membrane seals us off from the music we used to dance to? Why can't we hear?

Nothing safer than dead

Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkk.

What I miss is what she'd say. What she would have said.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

The bad bones have been bad, so they are better left unsaid. They are better left unsaying. But they were never happy, they always wanted more, they were always hungry. They can smell the words, the words coming out of your mouth all warm and yeasty. They want some words of their own. They'll be back.

Toxic shock was ominous because they never really said how you got it, or why, or what happened when you did get it. It just struck you dead in the cunt.

Vicky didn't say anything for a moment. "Red Cliff Canyon is a sacred area," she said.

I let him go, without a word about any other meeting, though he was the one thing I wanted to keep: I wanted him in my bed all night, asleep on my pillow, and I might have had him, but I said nothing.