Quotes About Silence

With finger on her solemn lip, Night hushed the shadowy earth.

There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isnt now. Outside there are sirens. Someones been run over. The century grinds on.

Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.

Dear God, help me pay attention! Dear God, help me keep my mouth shut! Dear God, let me put myself out of the way! Dear God, let me be wholly present to this person, your child!

Some people talk because they think sound is more manageable than silence.

Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.

She sat still, trying to hush her secret heart.

When a woman who has much to say says nothing, her silence can be deafening.

Look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence.

I can't say it. Now, at last, it becomes impossible for me to mouth the words -- I'm fine. I won't say anything.

I went upstairs to my room. Momentarily I felt a sense of calm, almost acceptance. Rest beyond the river. I knew now what that meant. It meant Nothing. It meant only silence forever.

Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.

Eravamo abituati uno sguardo così, l'uno accanto all'altra in silenzio, non ci dispiaceva.

Nemoj ništa govoriti,

A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.

The sudden silence is horrifying, and it seems to catch my mother off guard. A tiny whimper escapes her, the sound amplified in the stillness. Surely, my father hears her now; surely he and I can't go on pretending she isn't crying.

Conversation lets you be an artist every time you open your mouth--or shut it. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, "The most important art is to omit"; the key to being a master conversationalist is to listen at least as much as you talk. Just as the other arts include pauses in a dramatic play, white margins around printed text, and space between a singer's phrases, conversation is about silences as well as about words.

no insult can do us harm if only we do not say or do anything in return.

Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak.

Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.

People assume that men make all the rules, but sometimes mothers are the ones who command girls to be quiet while they arrange for us to be sold like oxen or mules.

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said.

I love silence but I fear emptiness.

The October wind, which had promised rain all day, hesitated in its reckless flight down the moist pavements to hurl a handful of fine drops at the windows of the drawing room in the big Hampstead house. The sound was sharp and spiteful, so that the silence between the two women within became momentarily shocked, as if it had received some gratuitous, if trivial, insult.