Quotes About Silence

Calumnies are answered best with silence.

When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me.

It was like how, when he read a poem to himself, the rhymes were neither sound nor silence. Unheard melodies in the mind's ear. The muted music of consciousness.

Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did.

Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.

We eat in silence, listening to the rain. Both of us look forlornly at the bar, thinking that we shouldn't, we mustn't. On the other hand, we could simply pass out drunk here and maybe they'd take us to jail. There are beds in jail. Soap. New people to meet.

Loud people have thin, hollow bones. They can be broken in half and discarded into a pit. They snap as easily as children do, but they will not burn as long in a fire. If a loud person tries to store his voice in a jar, he will not be able to, unless the jar is a mouth worn on the face of someone in his family, which he must prize open with his fingers while shouting deep into the hole there.

I write to say what I cannot speak

There was a long silence as we swam around in the strange currents of Dad's words.

You're looking at me, chair,' he said. 'You don't want me to sit on you, eh, because I fell in mud, isn't that correct?' The chair said nothing.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

asking them to refrain from media interviews.

I was warned not to comment in public on policy issues or to speak to the press.

He must have found the move disorienting, but we never spoke of it.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. . . . .The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away."13

It's not that everybody hates you. It's that millions of Americans are afraid to say that they agree with you.

Shut up! Sit Down!

Por qué seré tan callado? Cuanto más hablan los que me rodean, menos ganas tengo de decir algo.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.

For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night, For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children, The children spat-on at school. For the wrecked laboratory, The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.

Why have you taken my heart from me? I am not justice nor loyalty. I am the shape of the weathercock, That all winds come to and all winds mock. You are the image of the sea-carved stone, The silent thing that can suffer alone, The little women are easier, The easy women make lighter love, I will not take your face to war, I will not carry your cast-off glove.

We heard the shots in the night But nobody knew next day what the trouble was And a man must go to his work.

Talkers never acted when they could talk.

Todo el barrio se mueve; pero calla a la vez. Mil emociones se chocan; mil dolores son ahogados; mil lazos de amor y familia se quiebran; mil almas vuelan; pero todo esto se verifica en silencio, en medio de un movimiento automático y vertiginoso. Todo el barrio se mueve; pero calla a la vez. Sólo un ser (¡fatal excepción!) descansa y ronca en esta noche de muerte: es la partera. En tales noches no nace nadie.