Quotes About Silence

Never explain, never complain.

Never complain. Never explain.

I suppose I'm of the school of never explain, never complain.

No news is good news.

No news at 4:30 a.m. is good.

I was shocked when I would read a newspaper from that time, and the Freedom March wasn't even mentioned.

I worked at Military Media, an advertising agency for military-base newspapers. Don't ask, I won't tell.

I can't comment on every article in the newspapers.

I wanted easy banter and deep communication and long periods when neither of us felt the need to say anything at all. (p. 168, Trevor Benson)

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

La mayoría de la gente no sabe apreciar el silencio. Por eso siente la necesidad de hablar todo el rato.

Stille ist heilig. Sie verbindet Menschen, denn nur wenn man sich in Gegenwart eines anderen wirklich wohl fühlt, kann man schweigend beieinander sitzen. Das ist das große Paradoxon.

El silencio es sagrado; tiene la capacidad de unir a la gente, porque solo aquellos que se sienten cómodos en compañía de otro pueden estar juntos sin hablar. Una auténtica paradoja.

Silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.

Shhh," he said again.

Il silenzio è puro. Il silenzio è sacro. Unisce le persone perchè solo chi si sente a proprio agio in compagnia di un altro può fare a meno di parlare.

I am listening," he said. "I just hear the things you're not saying.

Maybe the silence you move through shaped me, the way a church bell ringing resonates long after the ear ceases to perceive it, the way waves space themselves until they stop. — Nick Flynn, from "Man Dancing with a Paper Cup," Some Ether: Poems . (Graywolf Press June 2, 2015)

I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.

We all spend so much time, not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're too desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move.

It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.

She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid for what they had done together.

He wanted to shout, telling her to stop. He wanted to tell her that he could stay, that he wanted to stay, that if leaving meant losing her, then going home wasn't worth it. But the words stayed trapped inside him...

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.