Quotes About Silence

Where we stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

Why are you so quiet?" he asks. Because, you want to say, I am a person with an interior world that you know nothing about.

His heart is too full, and no words to release it. I know what words do, he thinks. They let us feel less.

The key to happiness in life is knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

She is no longer speaking. Clearly, some response is required

past, nearly sideswiping them. "But if you'd been brave and come to me, I would have adopted her, Daniel. I would have forgiven you and I would have taken her in. I waited for you to say something, but you never did. I waited for days, then weeks, then years." "Ismay, you can believe what you want, but Marian Wallace

I'm not interested in your charity, Duke! Remember yesterday?" The dolt had surely had not forgotten her hurling his money at his head. "As for you, Papa, you forfeited the right to pick my husband when you had Charley lie to me and tell me you were dead. So, kill each other if you like. You're both fools, as far as I'm concerned!" With a furious sob, she ran the rest of the way to her cabin, leaving the two oddly similar men behind in an awkward, stymied silence.

WORDS ARE TEETH. AND THEY EAT ME ALIVE. FEED ON MY CORPSE INSTEAD.

And...what hurt can an unsaid word do? Can it be like an antibiotic withheld?

When the water boiled, Michiko poured it into the pot of green leaves and we both waited in the thick silence. I felt strangely calmed by this simple ritual I had seen my mother do many hundred times before. It was all that seemed to make sense in this place and I held on to it as if I were drowning.

No one spoke, The host, the guest, The white chrysanthemums. -Ry?ta

All persons who are enthusiastic that they should transcend the other animals ought to strive with the utmost effort not to pass through a life of silence, like cattle, which nature has fashioned to be prone and obedient to their stomachs.

Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don't trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being.

I grew up on a farm in a small town where you do or say one thing and everybody knows about it. You see it happen, there's always the town gossip - 'Oh did you hear about so and so, or did you hear what went on in this household?' So I learned at a very young age just to keep my mouth shut.

Nothing stuns others more than the quiet eruption of a normally quiet man.

I cannot lie still. I cannot be alone with this. I need to scream and thrash, because it stays away when I scream. When I'm silent, it finds me, it tracks me down and pierces me and says, "Now I've got you! Now you belong to me!

It's frustrating for me to be unable to speak. To feel that I have so much to say, so many ways I can help, but I'm locked in a soundproof box, a game show isolation booth from which I can see out and I can hear what's going on, but they never turn on my microphone and they never let me out. It might drive a person mad. It certainly has driven many a dog mad.

Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

Talk is only silence that ain't workin' well.

No one talked because we all wanted to scream.

There's a kind of quiet angry that can lie down over a house. Maybe there are some houses, like the Daughertys', that have never know it - that house probably hasn't ever had a quiet day. But in The Dump, Angry Quiet was an old friend, and he moved in again. No one talked because we all wanted to scream.

In dark hours," the poet W. H. Auden wrote of his dog Rolfi, "your silence may be of more help than many two-legged comforters.

God will speak to us through creation if we'll only listen. If you feel like your time in front of books or listening to sermons has become stagnant, grab a coat, pick up a walking stick, and step outside into a school that never closes.