Quotes About Silence

I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound.

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.

In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.

The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States.

World War II affected the male population in a very detrimental way. They were happy to be home, happy to be alive, happy they won, but they could not express to anybody the horror they had been through.

Both of my grandfathers served in World War II, both in the Pacific. One wouldn't talk about it, and one would.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal's 'Pensees' and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.'

A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.

I don't want to share my worries - that's for me to know.

Less is always more. The best language is silence. We live in a time of a terrible inflation of words, and it is worse than the inflation of money.

Letterman, despite whatever idiotic (or worse?) things he may have done with women on his staff, was wise enough to realize that silence isn't permanent and peace of mind can't be bought.

With a live audience, it's very clear when you've pushed it too far to the edge - because you fall off that edge and hit bottom with a thud. Nothing abstract about that. You know you went too far when you hear that groan or worse - that silence instead of the big laugh you were expecting following your hilariously edgy joke.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness.

Every Westerner is jubilating that the Berlin Wall has fallen. Something worst than the Berlin Wall is in Palestine; and nobody is talking about it.

The worst thing I could be accused of is that I'm a one-way dude, only out for myself. But the worst thing a woman can do is not to say anything. Especially when you're starting a relationship.

Being vocal and listening for sounds when we go out - that is what makes wrestling. If people were just silent, that's the worst thing you could hear.

Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.'

I spent a ton of time alone. I was raised by a feminist; I had a terrifying father and oppressively scary and mean brothers. We had a farm. The rule was between breakfast and lunch you weren't allowed to make a sound.

Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones.

In my family, depression is spoken of in hushed tones. As farmers we have always ploughed through our feelings.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.