Quotes About Silence

Mas se não compreendo o que escrevo a culpa não é minha. Tenho que falar porque falar salva. Mas não tenho nenhuma palavra a dizer.

But there are those who starve to death and all I can do is be born. My rigmarole is: what can I do for them? My answer is: paint a fresco in adagio. I could suffer the hunger of others in silence but a contralto voice makes me sing—I sing dull and black. It's my message of a person alone. A person eats another from hunger. But I fed myself with my own placenta. And I'm not going to bite my nails because this is a tranquil adagio.

In spite of sheer concentration and every effort of will power, Byrd could not avoid the terrible evenness and loneliness of silence.

One gave oneself time, one lost oneself, one followed the sun, one fell asleep so often on a bed of straw, and now, how fresh is the memory of wind one might say that the rain hissed a long silence and it was as if in the evening gods were born but so small that the birds pecked them like grain.

Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.

Twenty times a day, twenty different beings demand and receive from us the gift of what is best within us: our whole life offered forever in a moment. Perhaps these miracles demand darkness and silence? Then it will not be a novelist but a poet who will come to reveal them to us in whispers. And we'll pretend to not have understood in order to continue to be able to understand.

What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.

Elle a toujours écrit en épurant de plus en plus : chaque fois un peu moins de mots et un peu plus de silences, un peu moins de cantabile et un peu plus de moderato. Elle a toujours vécu en ajoutant sans retrancher.»

La mer chante à bouche fermée

Elena lo espera en silencio, frente a él pero de espaldas, y antes de que responda dice, mejor no me ponga un nombre, Padre, tal vez si usted o su iglesia encuentran una palabra para nombrarme, después se arroguen el derecho de decirme cómo tengo que ser, cómo tengo que vivir. O morir.

Un pacto tácito de frases hechas encadenadas, palabras que iban llenando el silencio, con el propósito de ni siquiera tener que hablar del silencio.

Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget.

there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

History's authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

You don't speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.

Our silence, our refusal of discomfort, our willful blindness, the shut-down feeling that refuses engagement, the rage that cancels complexity of response are also strategies. So is the need for answers and new strategies. The call for a strategy is a strategy, and I both respect and understand the necessity of that call.

All living is listening for a throat to open-- The length of its silence shaping lives. When he opened his mouth to speak, his speech was what was written in the silence, the length of the silence becoming a living.

and there I was, caught in the crossfire, aware of how loud a house could be in the absence of sound.

The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.

The heat compounded, and ugliness settled its cloud over us, profound as human speech, although by then we were not speaking.

And if only it would stop, shut itself up for good- this off-key 'if only' that goes on singing, like some deranged child, repeating.

We find in silence and body language the shadow of truth.