Quotes About Silence

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls. --from Crossing the Water, written 1962

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence. -

Shut up in public those bloody private wounds.

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering Blue and mystical over the face of the stars Inside the church, the saints will all be blue, Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

The claw / Of the magnolia, / Drunk on its own secrets, / Asks nothing of life.

I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.

Empty, I echo to the least footfall

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree is blackness--blackness and silence.

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars, the trees and flowers were strewing their cool odos. There was no moon.

How clever of them, I thought. They kept the feeling all secret; they wouldn't even let you write it down.

I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

And when the balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence How you jump—

The faces were empty as plates, and nobody seemed to be breathing.

The silence depressed me. It was not the silence of silence it was my own silence.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of my vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.

I looked up from that churning amphitheater to the view beyond it. The great, gray eye of the sky looked back at me, its mist-shrouded sun focusing all the white and silent distances that poured from every point of the compass, hill after pale hill, to stall at my feet.

No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter.