Quotes About Silence

He's a man of few words, and he doesn't know what either of them means," people said, but not when he was within hearing.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone's mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.

There was a click. There was a noise like a partridge. There was a thud. There was silence.

A word writ doon can hang a man

Granny Aching had never been at home with words. She collected silence like other people collected string. But she had a way of saying nothing that said it all.

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?

When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

To write," Marguerite Duras remarked, "is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

I will never be able to say what is in my heart, because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned. There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer...Each day I begin with the empty page.

Roland Barthes says, "That which cannot be named is a disturbance.

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, "Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.

Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the Moon exposing the night. Behind darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges.

It is winter. Ravens are standing on a pile of bones -- black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean. It's what I do each time I sit down to write. What else are we to do with our obsessions? Do they feed us? Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us? 'To write,' Marguerite Duras remarked, 'is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

This is wilderness, to walk in silence. This is wilderness, to calm the mind. This is wilderness, my return to composure.

Sorrow has a voice. It is the cold scream of silence turned inward.

Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wing. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness.

I fear silence because it leads me to myself, a self I may not wish to confront. It asks that I listen. And in listening, I am taken to an unknown place. Silence leaves me alone in a place of feeling. It is not necessarily a place of comfort.

The world is not a safe place. Perhaps it never has been, but it is still a beautiful place. This is the disorienting truth of the Colorado Plateau: We stand on the edge of a great erosion landscape. The silence before us translates into deep time. We look not simply toward a linear horizon but a curved one where the planet becomes a globe spinning toward change.

There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not aw a secret, but as a prayer.

He looked at her, and she couldn't contradict him. Nor could she offer any false reassurance. Silence, at least, was honest.

Kusursuz suç, diye düÅŸündü Jane. Ama bir görgü tan??? vard?. Mahsen merdiveninin alt?na saklanm??, sessiz bir k?z.

Only by the shuddering of the bed did Toby realize the girl was sobbing. Molly herself made no sound; it was as though her grief was trapped in a jar, her cries inaudible to anyone but her.