Quotes About Silence

Can you make her out at all?' Benjamin shrugged. As usual, in Cicely's presence, he was afraid of appearing inarticulate, and as usual, this fear robbed him of his power of speech.

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners

Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.

For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory. When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now.

Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?" "I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.

A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.

Invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you're on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate.

She'd barely registered as a person at all. She'd been little more than an inconvenient object at the breakfast table, an annoying vase in the way of his sugar bowl, not even worth telling a decent lie to. Soon enough, when she'd lost her fat, she would have more ways to make him pay. For now, the sweetest punishment would be to say nothing, let him think she knew nothing, let him damn himself by telling further lies.

Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.

In the instant before it was over and pure nothing, he heard all the human voices in the world.

They rode an elevator in silence. Too-precipitous intimacy had left in its wake a kind of dirty awkwardness.

It is the comfortable people, by and large - those like the Reading Teacher - who make the decisions in our society. It is the people who those decisions are going to affect who are expected to stand quietly, and watch patiently, and wait.

We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.

Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.

They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking.

The earth itself was unchangeable, the endless tracts of sand and water and pavement. It was the people, the perturbable madmen who roamed its surface, who viewed the world as transient and broken. Everett wished the earth could somehow reach up and still them, the crazy people, and invest them with its silence and permanence and depth.

His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s.

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice.

She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.

Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing Hey Jude. It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.