Quotes About Silence

we have to stop blasting them with noise.

up and she fell instantly silent. St. Claire glanced from Elizabeth's frosty glare to August's troubled gaze. He felt Celestine's

Brunetti watched Cesco trying to decide whether to say something else, so he made himself look as much like an oak tree as possible: patient, motionless, secure.

You know how it is. After a time, something that's happened, even if it isn't very nice, if you just don't talk about it, it sort of goes away. Not that you forget about it, not really, but it isn't there any more.' Brunetti recognized the familiarity of this, and Vianello said, 'It's the only way life can go on, really, if you think about it.

A love that dared not speak its name'? In recent years, Brunetti had come to wish that some sorts of love would decide to speak their names a bit less loudly. Did people not realize how tiresome so much of this conversation was to anyone who thought the sexual behaviour of other people was not a matter to discuss or judge?

She stood motionless like that for

At times Brunetti thought Italy was a country where everyone knew everything while no one was willing to say anything. In private, everyone was eager to comment with absolute certainty on the secret doings of politicians, Mafia leaders, movie stars; put them into a situation where their remarks might have legal consequences, and Italy turned into the largest clam bed in the world.

And today, to the best of his knowledge, no one spoke against it, either, but today the silence was based on the belief that slavery had ceased to exist.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.

But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn't want to spoil it by talking about it...

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.

Even if life is great--keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil.

At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad's anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.

it was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars

I had spent dozens of hours studying the photographs as though if I stared at them long enough and longingly enough I would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into their clear, pure silence.

We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother's funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn't work.

My sheets were damp with sweat. I got up and stuck my head out the window and took a few breaths. The chill air was so refreshing that I decided to put on some clothes and go for a walk. The moon was full and very bright. Everything was silent except for the chirp of the crickets and the full foamy toss of the wind in the trees.

it would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.

the place where words didn't work.

Nobody said anything. Dust motes floated in a sunbeam.

Then why aren't you happy?" "I don't want to talk about it." "And

I have got into one of my moping moods tonight,' said my father, after a silence; then quoting Shakespeare, whom, by way of keeping up our English, he used to read aloud, he said: 'In truth I know not why I am so sad: It wearies me; you say it wearies you; But how I got it – came by it . . . I forget the rest.