Quotes About Silence

with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us like the earth we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is —W. S. MERWIN

It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do.

My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.

You unconscious can't work when youare breathing down it's neck. You'll sit there going, Are you done in there yet? Are you done in there yet?. But it is trying to tell you nicely, Shut up and go away.

And you were ready to silence a Harper, and that is a greater wrong, for when speech is restricted, all men suffer, not just I.

for when speech is restricted, all men suffer

Nothing erases the immoral act. Not forgiveness. Not confession. And even if the act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. Not act of violence is ever resolved when the one who can forgive can no longer speak; there is only silence.

the dead lose every sense except hearing.

The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.

Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes follow her across the field, stepping from her clothes, strewn silk glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves to be looked at, swimming all night across the river.

There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.

A place so empty it was not even haunted

Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful. There are places that claim you and places that warn you away. Silence is the response to both emptiness and fullness.

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.

Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day's last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.

Silence settled around us. He was asleep again, and my heart was full of sorrow that he should mourn the loss of virility so keenly and above all else. We might no longer be lovers, but we were bound together by our past that stretched over well-nigh thirteen years. Even in sleep, his fingers held mine and I knew he was pleased.

He remained silent because silence was the only space large enough to hold it without crushing or bruising the heart of it.

His Back was turned to the end of the world and the end of the world was quiet.

I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.

It does not matter what it is; it matters how much there is of it; that all around the oases of your shining Western cities it exists; it is three-fourths of the world! Open your ears, my darling; listen to thier prayers; listen to the silence of those who've learned to pray for nothing. For nothing has always been their portion, whatever the name of their nation, thier city, their tribe.

Put out the light and then put out the light.

I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice.

At last he stood staring at the old Reuben Golding he thought he knew so well, and neither had a word for the other that mattered.