Quotes About Silence

Time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.

That's what the voices in your head are for, to get you through all the silent parts.

i would give anything to not have to spend the next twenty minutes sitting across from her, because she doesn't believe in letting silence go. no, she has to fill it up with talk. i want to tell her that's what the voices in your head are for, to get you through all the silent parts, but she doesn't want to be with her thoughts unless she's saying them out loud.

Silence equals death, we'd say. And underneath that would be the assumption—the fear—that death equaled silence.

They wouldn't beat him up. They wouldn't break his ribs. He knew that. But they had other ways of breaking him - with silence, with disappointment, with disapproval.

You expect death to bring some new form of punctuation, but there it is: one small gasp. Period.

We don't talk about anything. She talks, for sure. She talks and talks and talks. But we don't talk at all.

She is always there for him, and he must like that. His friends like her, and he must like that, too. But that's not the same as love. She has been hanging on to the hope of him for so long that she doesn't realize there isn't anything left to hope for. They don't have silences together; they have noise. -A

He is amazed that while there are some people you can see every day and not say a word to, there are other people whom you can see once a year __ or once a decade, or once a life __ and say anything.

I reach out my hand to say I'm sorry. He takes it, but gives nothing else away.

Do you wonder why we wander?" Cal had asked. It was the night of the first snow; you could hear the branches bending and the icicles falling outside the window, beyond the wall. They were warmth together. They were hot breath and blankets and wrapping themselves close. And Elijah had thought, I wonder why I never kiss you. I wonder what would happen. But he didn't say anything out loud.

No necesitamos hablar para ser conscientes de la presencia del otro.

Whatever secrets the dead take with them, they should be allowed to keep. That's my new philosophy. Or put another way: the time to properly know someone is when he, or she, is still alive.

At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.

Perhaps I have not mentioned the tennis courts.

His blank face communicated an emptiness that could never be filled - Frank Balenger

I find an empty page friendlier than speaking to another person.

When a person comes from a family or a group that has been marginalized, when she is one of the subalterns, the silence such a person confronts about herself and her experiences within the greater culture is a political condition. In such cases the very act of writing about herself and her experiences becomes a political act.

There is no better way to conceal oneself than by listening to others.

His embarassment would have pleased me, but once he recovered, there would be that awkward period that sometimes culminates in a handshake. I didn't want to touch these people's hands or see things from their point of view, I just wanted to continue hating them. So I kept my mouth shut and stared off into space.

I would clear the table and Hugh would do the dishes, neither of us speaking and both of us wondering if this just might be the one to do it. 'I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand,' people would say, and my rage would renew itself.

I can't remember the last time I've enjoyed silence in an American theater. It's easy to believe that our audiences spend the day saying nothing, actually saving their voices for the moment the picture begins.

If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, Hello. This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians. Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people.

When it's my turn, I'll open my mouth, unable to speak, and feel a little tap on my wrist. Time to stand up, my watch will whisper. Then, before killing myself, I'll say one last time, "I am standing up.