Quotes About Silence

Maybe your resistance is to live. Live big and loud and joyously and fiercely. Live authentic to who you are. Refuse to be silent. Refuse to go away. Refuse stereotypes and limits. Because you being you is the most powerful kind of resistance of all. (Rebecca Roanhorse)

Endless white ground below, and swirling flakes, and a lonely whistle of wind, and the shadow of houses.

With a drowning kind of quiet

You could be naked, you could scream and hang out on the roof, but you do not mess with the place with the books.

Left unattended, even for a few days, houses take on a strange feel. The cold accumulates in the corners. The dark settles down and pools on the furniture. Quiet leaks everywhere. The air sours.

She walked down the hill and she found relief in the unnatural stillness of the earth around her, the stillness of full light without sun, of leaves without motion, of a luminous, waiting silence.

If you intend to keep your word, don't talk about it, just do it.

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence.

He sat looking at her. She waited to see the derisive smile, but it did not come. The smile seemed implicit in the room itself, in her standing there, halfway across that room.

A stream cut across the grass, and tree branches flowed low to the ground, like a curtain of green fluid. The sound of the water stressed the silence. The distant cut of open sky made the place seem more hidden. Far above, on the crest of a hill, one tree caught the first rays of sunlight.

Her face looked as if she knew his worst suffering and it was hers and she wished to bear it like this, coldly, asking no words of mitigation.

The most beautiful words were those which were not needed.

They did not speak. Once, she said suddenly, "Mr. Galt." "Yes?" "No. Nothing. I just wanted to know whether you were still there." "I will always be there.

International 4-8818 and we are friends. This is an evil thing to say, for it is a transgression, the great Transgression of Preference, to love any among men better than the others, since we must love all men and all men are our friends. So International 4-8818 and we have never spoken of it. But we know. We know, when we look into each other's eyes. And when we look thus without words, we both know other things also, strange things for which there are no words, and these things frighten us.

No, Jim,' she said quietly, 'I guess I've never felt anything at all.

He stood looking straight at her. Their understanding was too offensively intimate, because they had never said a word to each other.

Her work was all she had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still.

She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was a gasp of pleasure.

There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.

They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.

She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt.

They say the heart of the earth is made of fire. It is held imprisoned and silent. But at times it breaks through the clay, the iron, the granite, and shoots out to freedom. Then it becomes a thing like this.

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives.

I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you.