Quotes About Silence

make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wendell Berry

I'm all right. I was telling the truth. I was all right. I was going to live right on. The house slowly filled up with silence. Nathan's absence came into it and filled it. I suffered by hard joy, I gave my thanks, I cried my cry. And then I turned again to that other world I had taught myself to know, the world that is neither past nor to come , the present world where we are alive together and love keeps us.

Woods I part the out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent there is singing around me. Though I am dark there is vision around me. Though I am heavy there is flight around me.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

It has always taken me a long time to think of something to say, and then more often than not I say it to myself.

If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe no answer stirreth wrath up.

All friends and comfortable with each other have ceased to talk, each occupied in that wide quiet with his own thoughts.

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. — Wendell Berry, from "How To Be a Poet," Given . (Counterpoint March 1, 2006) Originally published 2005.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool. There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.

Beyond all history that he knows, Where trees like great saints stand in time, Eternal in their patience. Loss Has rectified the songs that come Into this columned room, and he Only in silence, nothing in hand Comes here. A generosity Is here by which the fallen stand.

When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season… and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go. Sabbaths 2000 II

Who will speak of Africa's silences? Who will know where the work of true excavation must be done? •

when the atrocities a person has lived through are passed over in silence for lack of any trace or archive, paying tribute to someone would be a hoax. How do you convey Africa's silences?" Then

Enough, I can say no more.

Sometimes, the most effective form of interrogation is to say nothing.

The dust that fell unnoted as a dew, Wrapped the dead city's face like mummy-cloth

I have perceived much beauty In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; Heard music in the silentness of duty; Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night silence. Issac felt strangely wakeful. He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy; for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moan of the wind in the wood. (The Dream Woman)

Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us—and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone

You don't have to speak at all— I know what you'd say… - Laura

One after another, they were examined. One after another, they proved to have nothing to say--and said it (so far as the women were concerned) at great length...

Marian and I avoided all further reference to that other subject, which by her consent and mine, was not to be mentioned between us yet. It was not the less present in our minds--it was rather kept alive in them by the restraint which we had imposed on ourselves