Quotes About Silence

Although there was much I wanted to say, I knew that I should not. His mind and heart were out of alignment, and only he could bring them into harmony.

Taciturnity sometimes could be a sign of a healthy ego that did not require constant gratification

The hospital was drowned in the bottomless silence that fills

merely litter, as if it must have some ominous significance. As it gazed at me from the cupped palm of my right hand, I didn't realize that the sounds of the city were diminishing, until suddenly I became aware that a profound silence had fallen over the alleyway. For an instant, I thought that I had gone deaf, but then I heard myself say, "What's happening?

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

Friendship does not depend on conversation. Sometimes the most important communication is not mouth to ear, but heart to heart.

Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not a question, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet and grateful that it has been given to you to see this, to be for even a short time aware of the extraordinary layered depths and profound beauty of the world to which we mostly blind ourselves.

After a thoughtful silence, she said, "If a man is a beast, he's a beast in his heart, and that's not the kind of heart that beats in you.

I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.

There is the silence of death, found in tombs and deserted graveyards and in the cold-storage room in a city morgue and in hospital rooms on occasion; it is a flawless silence, not merely a hush but a void.

Guilt and shame have, until now, kept me silent on this issue. I am old enough, even if just twenty, to know that I have no logical reason to feel either guilt or shame, that I was the victim, not the victimizer. Yet I've been so long marinated in both emotions that they will forever flavor me.

Being alone can be good. It is easy to find peace alone. But sometimes...being alone is a kind of death.

In the company of other people, Amy had little tolerance for quiet. Enduring mutual silences, she sometimes felt as though the other person might ask a terrible question, the answer to which, if she spoke it, would shatter her as surely as a hard-thrown stone will destroy a pane of glass.

No helicopters are aloft. If boats ply the lake, they do so without running lights.

Darkness was conducive to contemplation.

Poor Clares.

You could withdraw, remake your life with a small circle of friends who didn't wish to silence and punish their fellow countrymen with whom they disagreed, who knew the grievous threat to peace that arose from contempt for others, from an inflated self-esteem that became vainglory. But there was no town remote enough, no fortress walls high enough to protect you from mad ideas with mass appeal

He could make many sounds, but none were words.

He makes eye contact with Katie for a moment, and then rests his chin

but as the dead

A passion to rule, to tear down society and remake it more to their liking, a passion to silence all dissent and to make a world in which they wouldn't have to hear an opinion at variance with their own. The passion for destruction always has more appeal to more people than does the passion to preserve and build. It's an ugly truth of human nature. Passion, sir. The kind of raw passion that breeds ruthlessness

The tape runs out. The recorder clicks off automatically.

The noises on the roof stopped. The six waited. The night seemed to be crouched like a wild thing, studying its prey, timing its attack.

the quiet is broken by a high-pitched buzzing like an immense swarm of angry wasps.