Quotes About Silence

you mailed your banned poems cloaked as letters to your sister-in-law because the silence of the world was a storm flooding your ears.

I keep telling him that whatever secrets I contain are nothing compared to the average German's secrets. Just what was that smell carried south from Sachsenhausen into the village? Somebody had a father, mother, sister, brother who looked the other way. What are my secrets as against theirs?

I want to read and write and be very quiet.

The body says what words cannot.

If a cone had dropped on velvet needles, if a star had lain a silver track across the sky, if the dead had turned in their graves - I swear, I would have heard it, that's how silent it all was.

Serene silence about your intentions can be incredibly powerful when you are speaking with someone who is trying to control you.

Ramad's expression tightened. Kai knew what he was thinking and also wished there was a way to make Dahin shut up.

I'm a shut up or get your head smashed.

We are living history," I told my mother breathlessly one night after the radio had been turned off and we sat in complete silence. "I could do with a little less history, thank you," she replied crisply and returned to mending some socks.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that ... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these man and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."

God can be addressed, but not expressed.

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

But gradually we learn something very precious under the tutelage of these wounds. We learn a compassion for others that replaces judging, self-loathing, and the compulsion to find someone to blame. We learn a reverent joy before our wounds that replaces the condemnation of and comparison of ourselves with others that used to fuel our anxiety. We learn that the consummation of self-esteem is self-forgetful abandonment to the Silence of God that gives birth to loving service of all who struggle.

The more we journey towards the Center the closer we are both to God and to each other. The problem of feeling isolated from both God and others is overcome in the experience of the Center. This journey into God and the profound meeting of others in the inner ground of silence is a single movement. Exterior isolation is overcome in interior communion

This book, by contrast, proceeds from an ancient Christian view that the foundation of every land is silence (Ws 18:14), where God simply and perpetually gives Himself, This Self-gift is manifested in the creation, in the people of God and their inspired (if stumbling) pursuit of a just society, and most fully, in the Christian view of things, in Jesus Christ.

We will have to depend in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people

For when we have learned to know God in the Son after apprehending the forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit, who clothes our hearts with joy and with the freedom from care because of which we despise sin and death, what is left? "Go, and do not keep silence, in order that the rest of the multitude may be saved too, not you alone.

In all evils we must confess that God is the author and say: "Since You have done it, we must be silent and dumb," lest we murmur or blaspheme against Him. And He must be implored to remove the evil. For he who does not know who brings in the evil becomes impatient in vain and attempts to banish it. It is as if a spear were hurled from an unknown place, and the one struck is angry in vain.

The saints, however, are in silence and patience and in hope (spes), not in physical activity (res), like those people, for they are saved by the name of the Lord. This does not come about except in hope and patience and silence, whereas the ungodly seek to be saved in bustle and physical activity (res), indeed by the vanity of physical activity.

Do not argue at all with the devil and his temptations or accusations and arguments, nor, by the example of Christ, refute them. Just keep silent altogether; turn away and hold him in contempt. For no one conquers the devil by arguing with him, since he is incomparably more clever than all of us. But if you should not fight with the devil, much less should you do it with man. Rather you should put up with him, because he does not do the work himself, but the devil uses man as his tool.

You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.