Quotes About Silence

In your distress you're making so much noise that you wouldn't hear a communication from God even if He were transformed into an anthropomorphic deity who could thunder instructions to you in impeccable BBC English. The way forward at this moment, I assure you, is not to thrash around making a noise. What you have to do is to listen—to listen to the silence and be calm.

People never like to talk about their slower relatives. I got a cousin, twice removed, got webs between his toes, ain't said one word his whole life. You never hear about him in the family newsletter that goes around every Christmas. Hell, nobody mentions me, either, if it comes to that. Families is funny about who they advertise.

The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow up to make their decisions, following the patterns of their own lives.

Never be afraid of the conversations you are having. Be afraid of the conversations you are not having.

I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking.

a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech

Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation—and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern

And if I'm homesick it's a window shrouded with ice where a young girl traces a name on the glass that's beginning to look like my name. It's the sky taking shape before me in the silence like a ghost who makes nothing come true.

Her chest ached like a dull wound when she realized that her silence did not cause him a moment's reflection or curiosity. When she looked out the corner of her eye at him, she could not tell what she meant to him... Another wish that never would come true, she saw then, even if she lived forever, was that he, that someone, would look at her not as an artistic study, but with love.

Be still. Be silent. Find the center of yourself.

Often, the most important part of a conversation was the waiting.

The chilly blue of loneliness was a shadow on snow. The

What's it going to take to shut you up? she asked. He spread his arms, palms out, and surrendered. Give me something else to do with my mouth.

said grace. A bit of eyes-closed silence before a meal was probably a very good thing, no matter what thoughts might pass through her mind—gratitude, regret, contemplation, or nothing at all.

they rarely spoke. They didn't need to, because they knew each other's hearts without words.

The very shapes of the trees were like frozen screams.

People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.' Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976

Suddenly I saw in front of me the Statue of the Faun, the Statue that I love above all others. There was his calm, faintly smiling face; there was his forefinger gently pressed to his lips. [...] Hush! he told me. Be comforted!

He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.

Mr. Norrell gazed at Strange with an odd expression upon his face as though he would have been glad of a little conversation with him, but had not the least idea how to begin.

Mr Hawkins said nothing; the Hawkins' domestic affairs were arranged upon the principle that Fanny supplied the talk and he the silence.

The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself.

Sometimes the boy wished they could sit and that words would flow. But when they sat, eyes would turn shyly away. Father and son usually fell silent. It was ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.

In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries.