Silences Quotes

1. "We kiss to say hello, to stave off silences, to show how much we've missed someone, to show we're glad to be with them. We kiss to stop arguments or to interrupt a conversation we no longer want to have. We also use kisses when we want to pretend that everything is all right. I've been doing a lot of that lately. But it turns out that some things just can't be kissed better."
Author: Ali Harris

2. "New York lesson 1 - never look lost. Lesson 2 - forget hallowed silences. It's the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices."
Author: Alison Fell

3. "It is my secrecy which makes you unhappy, my evasions, my silences. And so I have found a solution. Whenever you get desperate with my mysteries, my ambiguities, here is a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. You have always said that I was myself a Chinese puzzle box. When you are in the mood and I baffle your love of confidences, your love of openness, your love of sharing experiences, then open one of the boxes. And in it you will find a story, a story about me and my life. Do you like this idea? Do you think it will help us to live together?"
Author: Anaïs Nin

4. "He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It's hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: "His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory" (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB)."
Author: Ann Voskamp

5. "I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
Author: Arthur Rimbaud

6. "It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo."
Author: Arthur Rimbaud

7. "My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences."
Author: Audre Lorde

8. "It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

9. "All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity."
Author: Bell Hooks

10. "Well, " said her daddy, "your careless heedlessness has almost lost me my life. I am now going to give you a spanking." And he did and so dinner was a snuffling red-eyed meal filled with cold looks and long silences and the cheese souffle, which was delicious."
Author: Betty MacDonald

11. "There are many lay people and scholars alike, both with and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its seventh-century Arabian origins. Apply twenty-first-century science, logic, or humanistic reasoning to it and it falls apart.They believe this is why Islam has always relied so heavily on the threat of death. Question Islam, malign Islam, or leave Islam and you will be killed. It is a totalitarian modus operandi that silences all dissent and examination, thereby protecting the faith from ever having to defend itself."
Author: Brad Thor

12. "Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it."
Author: C.S. Lewis

13. "Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for."
Author: C.S. Lewis

14. "He's an indulgent sort of man……With a quick lip and a fierce tongue, the sort of tongue that draws you in with charm and words of praise, awkward silences and desperate worships."
Author: Coco J. Ginger

15. "Insert the biggest, most awkward silence in the history of big awkward silences."
Author: Cynthia Hand

16. "I think they have compatible silences."
Author: David Levithan

17. "Silences are the most underrated part of comedy."
Author: David Steinberg

18. "Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak."
Author: Elizabeth Bowen

19. "Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore."
Author: Elliott Carter

20. "I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others."
Author: Eve Ensler

21. "All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

22. "'The Exorcist' is amazing because it recognizes that silences can be as powerful as sound effects."
Author: Frank Darabont

23. "I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?"
Author: Gabriel Josipovici

24. "Harold had become, over the past week, a connoisseur of silences. He was an expert at differentiating the particulars; was this a Tranquil Silence, marked by slow sighs and peaceful smiles? Or was it a Tired Silence, marked by ornery chair shifting? Or a Tense Silence, full of tight breaths and cautious glances?"
Author: Graham Moore

25. "Silas talks about San Francisco, so avidly that I think he's trying to fill the air with words before it can be consumed with awkward silences. I don't know why I feel those silences lurking all around us, but every time Silas and I make eye contact, I can sense them there, waiting to slip in and make me blush. I try to avoid his eyes, stealing glances at his arched brows and bow-shaped lips whenever he's looking away."
Author: Jackson Pearce

26. "Le seul fait de rêver est déjà très important,Je vous souhaite des rêves à n'en plus finir,Et l'envie furieuse d'en réaliser quelques- uns,Je vous souhaite d'aimer ce qu'il faut aimer,Je vous souhaite d'oublier ce qu'il faut oublier,Je vous souhaite des chants d'oiseaux au réveil,Je vous souhaite des rires d'enfants,Je vous souhaite des silences,Je vous souhaite de résister à l'enlisement,À l'indifférence, aux vertus négatives de notre époque.Je vous souhaite surtout d'être vous."
Author: Jacques Brel

27. "The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind."
Author: Jay Griffiths

28. "I've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silenceso far, without spilling a drop."
Author: Jeffrey McDaniel

29. "In her white dress she was like a cold light coming into the room. Stoner started involuntarily toward her and felt Finch's hand on his arm, restraining him. Edith was pale, but she gave him a small smile. Then she was beside him, and they were walking together. A stranger with a round collar stood before them; he was short and fat and he had a vague face. He was mumbling words and looking at a white book in his hands. William heard himself responding to silences. He felt Edith trembling beside him.Then there was a long silence, and another murmur, and the sound of laughter. Someone said, "Kiss the bride!"
Author: John Edward Williams

30. "O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?And where did it come from?And why?"
Author: Julian Jaynes

31. "A great singer is he who sings our silences"
Author: Kahlil Gibran

32. "He went out with a variety of women, slept with some of them, hated the whole meaningless process. Drinks, dinners, plays and concerts and gallery openings ... He grew to despise the rigid formality of dating, missed the easy familiarity of simply being with someone, sharing friendly silences and unforced laughter."
Author: Ken Grimwood

33. "She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell."
Author: Khaled Hosseini

34. "Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

35. "Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions."
Author: Mary Webb

36. "Les silences entre les mots s'espacent, les bruits produits par mon horloge commencent à attirer son oreille. - Tu as beaucoup de succès au train fantôme, toutes les filles sont sorties le sourire aux lèvres, lâche-t-elle soudainement, décapitant l'ange qui passe."
Author: Mathias Malzieu

37. "Persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,excavating tunnels, drilling silences,insisting, running under my pillow,brushing past my temples, covering my eyelidswith another, intangible skin made of air,its wandering nations, its drowsy tribesmigrate through the provinces of my body,it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones,slips into my left ear, spills out from my right,climbs the nape of my neck,turns and turns in my skull,wanders across the terrace of my forehead,conjures visions, scatters them,erases my thoughts one by onewith hands of unwetting water,it evaporates them,black surge, tide of pulse-beats,murmur of water groping forwardrepeating the same meaningless syllable,I hear its sleepwalking deliriumlosing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes,it comes back, drifts off, comes back,endlessly flings itselfoff the edges of my cliffs,and I don't stop fallingand I fall"
Author: Octavio Paz

38. "I need Thee, O Lord, for a curb on my tongue; when I am tempted to making carping criticisms and cruel judgements, keep me from speaking barbed words that hurt, and in which I find perverted satisfaction. Keep me from unkind words and from unkind silences. Restrain my judgements. Make my criticisms kind, generous, and constructive. Make me sweet inside, that I may be gentle with other people, gentle in the things I say, kind in what I do. Create in me that warmth of mercy that shall enable others to find Thy strength for their weakness, Thy peace for their strife, Thy joy for their sorrow, Thy love for their hatred, Thy compassion for their weakness. In thine own strong name, I pray. Amen."
Author: Peter Marshall

39. "I'm an instinctive actor. I just see the part and play it. I'm more interested in what isn't said - the silences."
Author: Philip Glenister

40. "Don't you hate that? Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable? That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence."
Author: Quentin Tarantino

41. "One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions, and that includes one's words and silences, yes, one's silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's silences."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

42. "Forests to the [early] Northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And the forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories, one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved. The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and source of these tales....Forests are places where a person can get lost and also hide -- and losing and hiding, of things and people, are central to European fairy stories in ways that are not true of similar stories in different geographies. Landscape informs the collective imagination as much as or more than it forms the individual psyche and its imagination, but this dimension is not something to which we always pay enough attention."
Author: Sara Maitland

43. "It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things."
Author: Stéphane Mallarmé

44. "It seemed funny that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn't honest either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always."
Author: Steven L. Peck

45. "For it wasn't the secret--the secret that wasn't a secret anyway--that led to austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies."
Author: Sue Miller

46. "...the words make our silences easier--they're the current that runs under them."
Author: Sue Miller

47. "By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars."
Author: T.E. Lawrence

48. "The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (187)"
Author: Thomas Lewis

49. "Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot."
Author: Tillie Olsen

50. "The unified field theory that ties together Jobs personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan's music or why whatever product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping of Apple."
Author: Walter Isaacson

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