Wordless Quotes

1. "Their eyes met for a moment. And the glance that flickered between them had been a wordless message of understanding, the affirmation of a sympathetic secret alliance from which everyone else was excluded by natural law - the close mysterious blood-bond between two mutants, of which she had not yet heard. But, in some indescribable fashion, it had seemed, even then, that, obscurely, everything was already known and had been accepted, accepted finally and absolutely, in the depths of her unconscious self."
Author: Anna Kavan

2. "A poem should be palpable and muteAs a globed fruitDumbAs old medallions to the thumbSilent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown -A poem should be wordlessAs the flight of birdsA poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbsLeaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,Memory by memory the mind -A poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbsA poem should be equal to:Not trueFor all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leafFor loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -A poem should not meanBut be"
Author: Archibald MacLeish

3. "Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions."
Author: Barbara Januszkiewicz

4. "I've had a wordless phase, and that's still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung."
Author: Beth Gibbons

5. "How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!"
Author: Boris Pasternak

6. "Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, "God told me..." As they make their way through the world, they bear wordless, prophetic witness."
Author: Brennan Manning

7. "As the unmusical listener wants only the Tune, so the unliterary reader wants only the Event. The one ignores nearly all the sounds the orchestra is actually making; he wants to hum the tune. The other ignores nearly all that the words before him are doing; he wants to know what happened next.He reads only narrative because only there will he find an Event. He is deaf to the aural side of what he reads because rhythm and melody do not help him to discover who married (rescued, robbed, raped, or murdered) whom. He likes 'strip' narratives and almost wordless films because in them nothing stands between him and the Event. And he likes speed because a very swift story is all events."
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "If you bind your men to you with deception, how can you ever trust them? You have qualities they will come to admire. Why not let them grow to trust you naturally, and in that way--''There isn't time,' said Laurent.The words pushed themselves with sheer force out of whatever wordless state Laurent had been shocked into.'There isn't time,' Laurent said again. 'I have two weeks until we reach the border. Don't pretend that I can woo these men with hard work and a winning smile in that time. I am not the green colt my uncle pretends. I fought at Marlas and I fought at Sanpelier. I am not here for niceties. I don't intend to see the men I lead cut down because they will not obey orders, or because they cannot hold a line. I intend to survive, I intend to beat my uncle, and I will fight with every weapon that I have."
Author: C.S. Pacat

9. "In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

10. "Till gradually he became desperate, lost his understanding, was plunged in a revolt that knew no bounds. Inarticulate, he moved with her at the Marsh in violent, gloomy, wordless passion, almost in hatred of her."
Author: D.H. Lawrence

11. "A dog — a dog teaches us so much about love. Wordless, imperfect love; love that is constant, love that is simplegoodness, love that forgives not only bad singing and embarrassments, but misunderstandings and harsh words.Love that sits and stays and stays and stays, until it finally becomes its own forever. Love, stronger than death. A dog is a four-legged reminder that love comes and time passes and then your heart breaks."
Author: Deb Caletti

12. "Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave."
Author: Don DeLillo

13. "This was what she needed… the quiet turning to the other in the middle of the night, the wordless meeting of lips, skin, breath. The trust, unfurling one pale petal at a time, that he would be there."
Author: Eileen Wilks

14. "It was only that night, dreaming forbidden dreams of Laurence and the clear attraction he had already displayed towards her, that the dream was disturbed. She woke to pain, her eyes and mouth flashing open in a wordless scream as two strong fangs pierced her neck. A body lay across hers, warm and strong as she felt the life being sucked out of her. The moment he knew she was awake, Laurence had pulled back from feeding and smiled at her with a bloody grin. ‘You are mine now, Shiloh. You may never leave this house until the day I die.' He had warned her, planting a tormenting kiss on her lips before resuming his feed."
Author: Elaine White

15. "It is more raw and unfettered and I'm more likely going into something you could call extreme cartooning. There's a lot of that in the course of 'Holy Terror.' There are interludes where there are pictures - cartoon pictures - of modern figures and they are all wordless. It's up to readers to put the words in."
Author: Frank Miller

16. "The wordlessness of depression is a galling experience. You can't phone your friends, writing an e-mail is beyond you, you can't put pen to paper. The disease is a crash course in meaninglessness, lack of structure, the collapse of form."
Author: Gwyneth Lewis

17. "Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment."
Author: Halldór Laxness

18. "The two of them on top of the freezing slide, wordlessly holding hands. Once again they were a ten-year-old boy and girl. A lonely boy, and a lonely girl. A classroom, just after school let out, at the beginning of winter. They had neither the power nor the knowledge to know what they should offer to each other, what they should be seeking. They had never, ever, been truly loved, or truly loved someone else. They had never held anyone, never been held. They had not idea, either, where this action would take them. What they entered then was a doorless room. They couldn't get out, nor could anyone else come in. The two of them didn't know it at the time, but this was the only truly complete place in the entire world. Totally isolated, yet the one place not tainted with loneliness."
Author: Haruki Murakami

19. "Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling."
Author: Haruki Murakami

20. "Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. Everything that had accumulated over the years-- all he had seen, all the words he has spoken, all the values he had held-- all of it coalesced into one solid, thick pillar in his heart, the core of which was spinning like a potter's wheel. Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and rebirth of a planet."
Author: Haruki Murakami

21. "It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?"
Author: J.K. Rowling

22. "They had a great deal in common, Bowman a little defiantly said. What they had in common was more vital than similar interests--it was wordless understanding and accord. It was love, the furnace into which everything is dropped."
Author: James Salter

23. "They say this city can absorb anyone. It does seem that every nationality is here in some part. There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and theseven seas but looking for a reason to stay. I am not looking, I've found what it is I want.........I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means Ireview my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

24. "If you listen, you can hear it.The city, it sings.If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of the street, on the roof of a house.It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note."
Author: Jon McGregor

25. "My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books."
Author: Jon Scieszka

26. "I looked from one to the other, and realized that Barrons and my dad were having one of those wordless conversations he and I have from time to time. Though the language was, by nature, foreign to me, I grew up in the Deep South where a man's ego is roughly the size of his pickup truck, and women get an early and interesting education in the not-so-subtle roar of testosterone."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

27. "I watch her brooding -- soft downy breastfeathers warming nestlings still encased in fragile shells her wordless lullaby as soothing as the lapping of the waterand the rustle of our Father's wings..."
Author: Kate Mullane Robertson

28. "Smile again, something older, colder than reptilian, cold as the oldest brain of all speaking, short wordless bursts, the back of the back of the skull: "Let's see," she said, "who can keep the most secrets. And be the most surprised in the end."
Author: Kathe Koja

29. "I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along.I think for a fact that she'd rather he'd of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She's glaring at those big white whales leaping round on his shorts in pure wordless outrage."
Author: Ken Kesey

30. "If I could find one wordthat would shudder the airlike that frightened sob,that wordless prayerof my newly-born,who drew one breath,and with unopened eyessank back into death;If I could break the world's cold heartwith that cry,then this grief would liftand I could die."
Author: Kenneth L. Patton

31. "Later, the child climbs down from her mother's knee and clambers up onto Tom. He holds her wordlessly, trying to imprint everything about her: the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, the shape of her tiny fingers, the sound of her breath as she puts her face so close to his.The island swims away from them, fading into an ever more miniature version of itself, until it is just a flash of memory, held differently, imperfectly by each passenger. Tom watches Isabel, waits for her to return his glance, longs for her to give him one of the old smiles that used to remind him of Janus Light – a fixed, reliable point in the world, which meant he was never lost. But the flame has gone out – her face seems uninhabited now."
Author: M. L. Stedman

32. "I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny, and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace. But as the conversation at the table unfurled like a sail amid the happy clatter of silver, tacking from stories of hunting to motherlodes of mushrooms to abalone adventures, I realized that in this particular case, words of grace were unnecessary. Why? Because that's what the meal itself had become, for me certainly, but I suspect for some of the others, too: a wordless way of saying grace."
Author: Michael Pollan

33. "Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness."
Author: Miguel Syjuco

34. "An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife."
Author: Nikki Gemmell

35. "They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear."
Author: Patricia Highsmith

36. "And I put my hand on her arm to stop her rowing.Aaron's Noise roars up in red and black.The current takes us on."I'm sorry!" I cry as the river takes us away, my words ragged things torn from me, my chest pulled so tight I can't barely breathe. "I'm sorry, Manchee!""Todd?" he barks, confused and scared and watching me leave him behind. "Todd?""Manchee!" I scream.Aaron brings his free hand towards my dog."MANCHEE!""Todd?"And Aaron wrenches his arms and there's a CRACK and a scream and a cut-off yelp that tears my heart in two forever and forever.And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside of me."
Author: Patrick Ness

37. "We fought over the bill when it came. By fought I mean: I insisted loudly on paying half and he responded with beleaguered silence. Instead of discussing it or attempting to engage in my one-sided conversation, he wordlessly put his credit card in the holder; he kept it carefully out of my reach as I continued to list all the reasons we should split the check, not the least of which was that we'd agreed earlier that this was not a date,then handed it stealthily to the waiter as he passed. I was still oblivious, making my case, when Quinn signed the receipt."Wait- what are you doing?" I looked from him to the paper slip.Silence. Scribble. Silence. "Did you just sign that? Was that the check?" My voiced hitched, my eyes wide with pseudo outrage. He glanced up at me, something like mock innocence lighting his features, and said, "I'm sorry. Did you want to split that?"
Author: Penny Reid

38. "These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage."
Author: R.H. Blyth

39. "I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon.Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all.These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon."
Author: Randall Robinson

40. "Few realize how loud their expressions really are. Be kind with what you wordlessly say."
Author: Richelle E. Goodrich

41. "ARE YOU CRAZY?" I ASKED. He gave me the same wordless look he always did when I asked that question."
Author: Richelle Mead

42. "For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

43. "The gods have meant that I should dance, and by the gods, I will dance!!! For in some mystic hour I shall move to the unheard rhythms of the cosmic orchestra of heaven, and you will know the language of my wordless poems, and will come to me... for that is why I dance.""Los dioses me destinaron a bailar, ¡y por los dioses bailaré! Pues en alguna hora mística me moveré a los ritmos ináuditos de la orquesta cósmica del cielo, y conocerás el lenguaje de mis poemas sin palabras, y vendrás a mí... pues por éso es que bailo."
Author: Ruth St. Denis

44. "Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us."
Author: Stephen King

45. "So let's say my bad luck did crash the plane. What exactly are were you going to do about it?' 'Why is the plane crashing?' He was trying to hide a smile now. 'The piolets are passed out and drunk.' 'Easy. I'd fly the plane.' Of course. I pursed my lips and tried again. 'Both engines have exploded and we're falling in a death spiral towards the earth.' 'I'd wait till we were close enough to the ground, get a good grip on you, kick out the wall, and jump. Then, I'd run you back to the scene of the accident, and we'd stumble around like the two luckiest surviours in history.' I stared at him wordlessly. 'What?' He wispered." - Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, Eclipse"
Author: Stephenie Meyer

46. "We moved wordlessly from one room to another, from the room of the dead to the room where time lay in pages everywhere I looked."
Author: Susan Meissner

47. "The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling."
Author: Susanne K. Langer

48. "Love is a wordless unspoken poem"
Author: Tarif Naaz

49. "The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept."
Author: Thomas Merton

50. "This is thy hour o soul, thy free flight into the wordless,away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,night, sleep, death and the stars."
Author: Walt Whitman

Wordless Quotes Pictures