Quotes About Silence

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.

For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language.

She moved in a silent ferocity of dignity which barely escaped being ludicrous.

Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly that now they cannot even speak to one another. It does not demand much reflection to be appalled at the inevitable state of mind achieved by people who dare not speak freely about those things which most disturb them.

There are tears on his face, his face or mine, I don't know. I kiss him where our tears fall. I start to say something. He puts one finger on my lips. He smiles his little smile.

I wanted to say so many things. Yet when I opened my mouth, I made no sound. And yet - I do not know what I felt for Giovanni. I felt nothing for Giovanni, I felt terror and pity and a rising lust.

And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in silence which was music from everywhere.

Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something - and I watched you - and you never said anything - and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked to make this room for you.

And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound.

My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John's mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful speculation. And not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint, far wind, which bid it: 'Arise

For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would.

We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere.

When two people have so much to say to each other that there's almost nothing they can say, and they just stare at each other. But that's saying something, too.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

If you allow Their chill to reach Into the great, great deep, You become one with them, Inarticulate.

What about bushido? the ghosts of his ancestors had always asked him. What about bushido? he had always asked them back. They had never answered.

That's the first rule of survival in enemy waters: volunteer nothing.

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

They were heedless of the fact that they'd gain more converts if they just stopped talking.

Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing. Have you heard That silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?

All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of his presence.11

It's cold and it's winter and the world has gone to sleep

There are never words for the strongest of our feelings. There is just the pain that we cannot share. Pain we must all feel alone.