Quotes About Silence

That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." At the time

Maybe that's the sign of true friendship, when silence is not uncomfortable.

I used to think the same thing. Thought that by keeping it to myself, I was protecting you. Truth is—" He shook his head and spat again. "The truth is the only thing that doesn't hurt.

When he was finished, he left without so much as a word.

Out of the mouth of babes you have perfected praise so that you might silence the enemy and the avenger.

That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." At the time I had not read Wittgenstein

I don't think about you at all when your mouth is closed.

To the best of my knowledge he had never even voted, and then someone must have told him something about politics, some convincing lie, or he read something—it's usually one or the other—and he stopped being funny and turned mean and silent. That wasn't so bad, but then he stopped being silent.

You do not think much of me, do you, Cogburn?" "I don't think about you at all when your mouth is closed.

He was able to sit in silence for long stretches without feeling a need to make small talk.

We worked in silence. One thing I liked about the cook was that he knew when to shut up even when he was mubblefubbled and dying to talk. Occasionally, I felt his eyes, like fishhooks, try to catch mine as we squeezed past one another in the narrow galley, but he kept his thoughts untongued. Personally, I was too pitchkettled to trust my own speech.

If there's no relationship with a father who's absent, nobody talks about it.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

MY SECRET IDENTITY IS The room is empty, And the window is open

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

Because the light is always with us and the hush of an early morning time propitious to plain speech space between the premonition and the event the small lovely realm of the possible.

I like the silence between us, The quiet–that holy state even the rain Knows about. Listen to her begin to fall, As if with eyes closed, Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart. — Charles Simic, closing lines to "This Morning," A Wedding in Hell (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994)

Silence is the only language god speaks.

The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

Now he realized that somehow those who had served in France and elsewhere knew a world that couldn't be shared. How could he tell his sister—or even his father, if the elder Rutledge was still alive—what had been done on bloody ground far from home? It would be criminal to fill their minds with scenes that no one should have to remember. No one.

There's a beauty in birds on the wing, That stirs the heart and makes earthbound creatures Long for flight, but the larks above the battlefield Are silenced by the sounds of war. I have watched birds out at sea, Catching the wind, And longed to follow them, To some safe place far from here.

He won't tell me very much about his war. None of us do. It isn't something to share, you see. What we've seen, what we've done, ought to stay in France. But it didn't, it came home in our memories. They aren't memories we want you to know. You are the world we fought for. Safe and sane and not ugly. Better to keep it that way.

They all forget that those who make the least noise do the most work. An engine that expends all its steam in whistling, has nothing left with which to turn wheels. Then let us cultivate silence. All that we can save in noise we gain in power.