Quotes About Silence

Martha Whites were a form of punishment only T. Ray could have dreamed up. I shut my mouth instantly.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible?

The door closed. So quiet it amounted to nothing but a snap of air, and that was the strangeness of it, how a small sound like that could fall across the whole world.

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself. There in the rootbed of fertility, World without end, as the legend tells it. Under the words you are my silence.

I fell quiet, too. The wooden door onto the courtyard was flung wide onto the Egyptian night. I listened to wind shake the palm fronds. The dark, tumbling world.

WHEN JOHN CALLED UPON the multitude to repent and be cleansed of their sins, we streamed into the river with the rest of them. I didn't go in hungry to turn back to God's law—I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I'd dreamed of birthing.

Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for.

I didn't go in hungry to turn back to God's law—I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I'd dreamed of birthing.

I, I am without God And I am she whose God is magnificent . . . I am being I am she who is nothing . . . I am the coming together and the falling apart I am the enduring and the disintegration . . . I am what everyone can hear and no one can say

I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I'd dreamed of birthing.

Miss Sarah never tattled. She tugged the rug over

I took a deep breath and gazed up at him. "Jesus." His head slumped toward his shoulder and I saw he was looking at me. He didn't speak, nor did I, but I told myself later that everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering

He gazed at me with kindness and pity. "To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.

Words collected in my mouth and lay there.

He gazed at me with kindness and pity. "To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil." I turned

He didn't speak, nor did I, but I told myself later that everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.

Noise was on her list of slave sins, which we knew by heart. Number one: stealing. Number two: disobedience. Number three: laziness. Number four: noise. A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don't see it, don't hear it, but it's always hovering round on ready.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence. In this world, there were no individual demands, and asking permission for everything was infantilizing. So we began to understand our students, who had never been able to do anything on their own.

Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.

Feed your soul with silence. That's where dreams are born.

the house and everyone in it lay in a sleep that would not be broken.

Words got me into trouble. They are the deadliest weapons of all, so that now the gun seems almost innocent by comparison. I fired the shot to stop the words; they were so busy eating everything up. You have no idea how I hate words, how i see them winding out of people's mouths like sticky strands of a web, infinitely elastic, linking the speaker to the listener forever, and finally weaving an impermeable cocoon around the mind and then the poor, fast-beating heart itself.