Quotes About Silence

Worte taugen nichts. Ja, manchmal klangen sie wunderbar, aber sie liessen einen im Stich, sobald man sie wirklich brauchte. Nie fand man die richtigen, niemals, aber wo sollte man auch nach ihnen suchen? Das Herz ist stumm wie ein Fish, auch wenn die Zunge sich noch so viel Muehe gibt, ihm eine Stimme zu geben.

No te preocupes por no poder hablar -solía decirle Dedo Polvoriento-. La gente no suele prestar atención.

She] did not reply. She didn't want to talk to anyone. She just wanted to listen to what her bewildered heart was telling her.

Es schneite, als sie ans Seeufer ins Freie traten, und hinter ihnen verschwand die Burg zwischen den wirbelden Flecken, als löse sie sich auf in Weiß. Die Welt um sie her war so still, als hätte sie alle Worte aufgebraucht, als wäre nun alles erzählt, was es in dieser Welt zu erzählen gab.

Es gab Geschichten, dass der Natternkopf seinem Herold auch ein Herz aus Silber hatte anfertigen lassen, aber Fenoglio war sicher, dass in der Brust des Pfeifers ein menschliches Herz schlug. Nichts war grausamer, als ein Herz aus Fleisch und Blut, weil es wusste, was Schmerzen bereitete.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass. Wallace Stephens

He had never taken any interest in what came after death, either in this world or the other one. Probably just silence, silence without a single word of comfort.

Don't let it worry you, not being able to speak,' Dustfinger had often told her. 'People tend not to listen anyway, right?

The world around them was as still as if it had used up all the words, as if all the tales there were to tell in this world had now been told.

so silent you could almost have forgotten he was there.

The wrong words. They were true a hundred times over, yet they sounded like a lie. Hadn't he always known it? Words were useless. At times they might sound wonderful, but they let you down the moment you really needed them. You could never find the right words, never, and where would you look for them? The heart is as silent as a fish, however much the tongue tries to give it a voice.

She felt as if the grave stones were whispering those names to her as she walked past... Those stones that bore no names seemed like closed mouths, sad mouths that forgotten how to speak. But perhaps the dead didn't mind what their names had once been?

But as an actual old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, she understood the silences. She didn't have to talk to Seth about most things, because she had him modeled so well in her mind, she knew what he would say to practically anything she might say to him—and vice versa. They could sit together, not speaking. The silence wasn't distance, it was closeness. She'd catch him looking and grinning sometimes. She'd grin back.

It was as if, when her father spoke, her mother looked at him and saw a little goldfish, popping open his mouth over and over again but making no sound. And when her mother spoke, her father looked and saw a piranha doing the same thing.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

The room was silent, and then my grandmother said, "I won't claim I've never in my life done anything I'm ashamed of, but I haven't done anything for a good while. If not everyone would agree with the decisions I've made, that's fine. What other people think has never made a situation right or wrong.

RESIST no thought; RETAIN no thought; REACT to no thought; RETURN to the sacred word.

Somewhere in those depths of silence I came upon my first experiences of God as a loving presence that was always near, and prayer as a simple trust in that presence.

She stood to drink in the darkness and the air fallen still after a snowfall. The clouds had all blown away. Faint moonlight silvered the fresh snow. Stars shone in a black sky, like jewels on a Lady's cloak. The garden lay shrouded in silver white silence, all its roughness made smooth. Such snow, Gwyn thought, had a way of turning the world into what it was not and making it seem safe. Such snow masked the true face of the world.

The air in the library rooms was silent, full of ideas, the thinking of the writers of books, the thinking of the readers of books.

At Beriel's silence she turned around -- and fury crashed against her like a wave thrown by a storm against the rocky coast.

But on this night, for this Volkking's death, when the Death Maiden no longer cried out, and the beating hands had tired, and throats were too raw to howl again, and silence flowed like night out of the low doorway of the Death House, flames erupted --

The No filled the whole air of the house. Every time she breathed in she breathed in that No.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.