logo

Quotes About Silence

To Auriel, I will give the gift of gold. After the night of long and false captivity, the golden SUN is about to rise, and all this by the power of the Stone, lapis ex caelis; for be sure that as Auriel rises the LION shall fall. Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat.
~ Elizabeth Redfern
Three life lessons: 1.No one will see you. 2.No one will say anything. 3.No one will save you.
~ Elizabeth Scott
Are you okay?" he says, still looking at me, and I feel my smile slip, fade, and the silence that falls over us then is so total I can't hear anything, not the rush-hiss of my heart pounding in my chest, not the sounds all around us; insects, wind, and the distant clatter of others' lives in houses built close but not too close because when we look out our windows we all like to pretend that everything we see is ours. But Ryan is not mine.
~ Elizabeth Scott
He kept talking and I thought about taking my copy of Huckleberry Finn and stuffing it in his mouth so he'd shut up.
~ Elizabeth Scott
If she could breathe then it could be heard, but she was breathless.
~ Elizabeth Scott
I see it in his eyes, he has eyes you can see everything in, and I say, "Morgan," my voice as quiet as the ghost I am supposed to be.
~ Elizabeth Scott
You,I think. I am terrified of you. Of how your kindness makes me like you in spite of myself. Of how you make me dream things I haven't dreamed in forever. You,I think. But I don't say it.
~ Elizabeth Scott
O where does he stalk like a horse in pastures very far afield? I cannot hear him, and silence writes more terrible things than he can ever deny. Is there a suspicion the battle is lost? Certainly he killed me fourteen nights in succession. To rise again from such slaughter Messiah must indeed become a woman. He said this absence was the mere mechanics of the thing. But It is not the same.
~ Elizabeth Smart
How can she walk through the streets, so vulnerable, so unknowing, and not have people and dogs and perpetual calamity following her? But overhung with her vines of faith, she is protected from their gaze like the pools in Epping Forest. I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injury only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.
~ Elizabeth Smart
So the price of careless rapture is a twisted history chronicled by envy. You were too busy being. And you are too busy now. You couldn't spare the time to note down a few facts: how the sun and silence poured into the big room with the yellow curtains; how everything was never-ending and expendable.
~ Elizabeth Smart
But we're both old enough to know things now, and that's good." "What things?" "When to shut up, mainly.
~ Elizabeth Strout
People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can't say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.
~ Elizabeth Strout
And she learned - freshly, scorchingly - of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn't. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, "You'll have another one.
~ Elizabeth Strout
And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.
~ Elizabeth Strout
Stop it! Tell me how it's really been! He sat back, pushed his glass forward. It's just the way it was, that's all. People either didn't know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.
~ Elizabeth Strout
Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can't stand the blah-blah-blah.
~ Elizabeth Strout
She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.
~ Elizabeth Strout
The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had—their inner selves brushing up against the other.
~ Elizabeth Strout
Mensen zijn eenzaam, dat wil ik hier maar mee zeggen. Veel mensen kunnen niet tegen degenen die ze goed kennen zeggen wat ze misschien wel zouden willen zeggen.
~ Elizabeth Strout
People either didn't know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.
~ Elizabeth Strout
It was terrible, though, when you couldn't tell people things. Olive felt this keenly as the days went by.
~ Elizabeth Strout
And she learned—freshly, scorchingly—of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn't. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, "You'll have another one.
~ Elizabeth Strout
Il silenzio, là dove avevano riecheggiato per tanti anni il suono della voce di Pam, le sue chiacchiere, le risate, le opinioni taglienti, gli improvvisi scoppi di pianto. L'assenza di tutto questo, il silenzio di una doccia che non scorreva, di cassetti che non si aprivano, perfino il silenzio di se stesso, che quando rientrava in casa non parlava, non raccontava a nessuno la sua giornata. Quel silenzio quasi lo uccideva.
~ Elizabeth Strout
And there seemed nothing to be done about it. And nothing was done about it. Because I could not speak of it and William became less happy and he closed down in small ways, I could see that happen. And we lived our lives on top of this.
~ Elizabeth Strout