Quotes About Silence

every chapter you write is surrounded by those you don't, every confession by what remains secret or indescribable or unremembered.

If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum. Even those who have been audible have often earned the privlage through strategic silences or the inability to hear certain voices, including their own.

Women are instructed, by the way victims are treated and by the widespread tolerance of an epidemic of violence, that their value is low, that speaking up may result in more punishment, that silence may be a better survival strategy. Sometimes this is called rape culture, but like domestic violence, the term narrows the focus to one act rather than the motive for many; patriarchy is a more useful overarching term.

Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit.

Silence, like Dante's hell, has its concentric circles. First come the internal inhibitions, self-doubts, repressions, confusions, and shame that make it difficult to impossible to speak, along with the fear of being punished or ostracized for doing so.

De Certeau's metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes, and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives.

any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It's how we make the world.

The deadened seek out the living to exterminate feeling, either by making their targets join them in numbness or by intimidating or assaulting them into silence. In the landscape of silence, the three realms might be silence imposed from within; silence imposed from without; and silence that exists around what

The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims.

Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.

Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate.

Conservatives are now largely fighting rearguard actions. They are trying to reassemble a world that never really existed quite as they imagine it (and to the extent that it did, it existed at the expense of all the people—the vast majority of us—forced to disappear, into the closet, the kitchen, segregated space, invisibility and silence). Thanks

Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to choose—between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation. If ideas don't go back in the box, there's still been a huge effort to put women back in their place. Or the place misogynists think we belong in, a place of silence and powerlessness.

Es la arrogancia lo que lo hace difícil, en ocasiones, para cualquier mujer en cualquier campo; es la que mantiene a las mujeres alejadas de expresar lo que piensan y de ser escuchadas cuando se atreven a hacerlo; la que sumerge en el silencio a las mujeres jóvenes indicándoles, de la misma manera que lo hace el acoso callejero, que este no es su mundo.

The earth is seven-tenths water, but the ratio of silence to voice is far greater. If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum.

Zip it kiddo. Don't ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it'll be used against you later in life.

That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One's whole life depends on one's looks but one mayn't speak of one's own beauty

To lose such an important listener in life is like losing my shadow. With no shadow, does a person truly exist under the sun? With no listener, does a person really have a voice? Silence means so many things to human beings. Some of them are unbearable.

Jeho nedostatkem nebylo jeho konání, ale jeho ml?ení.

Samomluva a ml?ení prozrazují stav skupiny stejnÄ› jako sny.

The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.

Jusqu'au fond de l'horizon imaginable, jusqu'au bout du monde, il entendait la chute immense et molle des flocons.