Quotes About Silence

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

They let the silence stand then . . . not uneasily, just taking a moment to breathe in time, to listen to the noises around them. How pleasant, Jane thought, to be silent for a few moments. Normally noise overtook her life—normally she sought it, finding silence solitary and confining—suffocating. But how pleasant to be silent with someone.

looking round him wildly. The boys were calm and said nothing.

your ears and put them over your mouth," Butcher says. "Learn to listen, see, smell, and absorb everything around you without speaking your thoughts first. If

Sometimes the loneliness had been almost too much, he thought, and always at those times he had found comfort in the woods, where he said nothing. He wondered if the others were still gloomy; no one spoke of it any longer. He smiled as he thought of how the women had wet and screamed and straddle behind him, I want to run to catch up once more.

Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.

No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.

There must be a great many of them here who think as I do, and we dare not say a word to each other out of our desperation, we are speechless animals letting ourselves be destroyed, and why? Does anybody here believe the things we say to each other?

when you sit in a forest everything appears still. But it isn't really. If you listen and watch closely, life is happening everywhere around you...In silence, life keeps raging on.

I was impressed. She had already mastered the art of not saying much of anything at all.

the Rokuj? lady was much more than a passing affair, and something in the way you wrote it made me certain: you must have loved someone else, someone young, not Akio's father. And that person died, didn't he? At the front." "Yes." Mieko said the one word, and nothing more.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

There are... things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Peace is not something that happens by accident. Peace is like silence; it is always there. The lack of harmony in our lives is like noise superimposed on the silence. The issue is not how to create peace, but how to live in a way that eliminates the noise.

Ne htedoh, ne htedoh ti nista reci. Videh u tvojim ocima dva mala, luda drveta. Od povetarca, smeha i zlata njihala su se. Ne htedoh ti nista reci.

The night itself is riddled with her, wide with her, and alive with her. It seems that it has no word or other traveler, no other secret sign.

Nos manchan y nos llagan, creo yo, los delitos del matón rural que roba previos de indios, vapulea hombres y estupra mujeres sin defensa a un kilómetro de nuestros juzgados indiferentes y de nuestras iglesias consentidoras

Mi grito vivo no se le relaja; ciego y exacto lo alcanza en los riscos. Avanza abriendo el matorral espeso y al acercarse ya suelta su espalda, libre lo deja y se apaga en mi puerta. Y ya no hay voz cuando cae a mis brazos porque toda ella quedó consumida, y este silencio es más fuerte que el grito si así nos deja con los rostros blancos.

O little sliver of moon waning that shines on waves desolately reigning, O little sliver of silver, what mass of dreams swells here towards your gentle glow! Fleeting breaths of foliage, sighs of flowers from the woods exhale to the sea: no song, no cry, no sound pierces the vast silence. Oppressed by love, by pleasure, the world of the living falls asleep… O little sliver waning, what mass of dreams swells here towards your gentle glow! (Trans. Michael Shindler)

They remained silent, while the bronze tolling passed over their heads so powerfully that they seemed to hear it in the very roots of their hair like a quiver of their flesh.

How does every person not cry out all the time?

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?