Silence Quotes

He'd kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.

~ Kim Edwards

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.

~ Alan W. Watts

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.

~ Toni Morrison

Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.

~ Julius Lester

I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.

~ Albert Camus

The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.

~ François Mauriac

He watched her retreat, his eyes lazy, and his body unmoving. A trickle of blood seeped slowly from the corner of his mouth. He let her get nearly out of the room before he spoke, “I may not have the right, Silence, me love,” he drawled so soft she nearly didn’t catch the words. “But I would’ve listened to ye. I would’ve believed ye.

~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.

~ Miguel De Unamuno

The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.

~ Rémy De Gourmont

I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else’s values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don’t believe. Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won’t stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

You misinterpret everything, even the silence.

~ Franz Kafka

You're mine, Angel, and don't you forget it. Your fights are my fights. What if something bad had happened today? It was bad enough when I thought your ghost was haunting me; I don't think I can handle the real thing.

~ Becca Fitzpatrick

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

~ John Fowles

The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.

~ Thomas Harris

A star shoots bleeding across the skyline, a companion to the black wind. Silence comes sweeping across everything.

~ Joë Bousquet

the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.

~ Suzanne Collins

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sound contribute toward me.

~ Walt Whitman

I waited for her to catch up, and when I did, she slowed down, and I missed seeing the light in her hair. I never told Nadia how much I liked seeing the halo the sunlight made of her hair. Sometimes silence is a habit that hurts.

~ E.l. Konigsburg

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.(Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.)Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

~ Samuel Beckett

A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.

~ Gaston Bachelard

It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.

~ Sarah Orne Jewett

Those who have witnessed executions say there is no sound worse than the weeping of mother watching her son being put to death. They're wrong. There is one sound that is worse. There is silence.

~ Carolee Dean

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

~ Sarah Orne Jewett

Stop your whining. If you are frightened, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts predators. And you are not prey.

~ Robin Hobb

Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.

~ Madeleine L'engle

There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

~ James Robertson

Will ye come with me?” he whispered.And she answered without hesitation. “Yes, please.

~ Elizabeth Hoyt

This is a tale of woe. This is a tale of sorrow. A love denied, a love restored, to live beyond tomorrow. Lest we think silence is the place to hide a heavy heart, remember, to love and be loved is life itself without which we are nought.

~ Abi Morgan

Somtimes silence can be the loudest thing.

~ Ellie Mathews

It never dawned on us that life is unpredictable, that one day, one of us could suddenly cease to exist and what then? What would be the joy in having left so much unsaid? With what memories would we fill the empty silence?

~ Isabel Lopez

Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.

~ Aldous Huxley

He grunted and stirred, withdrawing from her. She only had a moment to be disappointed and then he flipped her to her back and rose over her, powerful and male. He casually parted her legs with his knees and thrust into her again, hot and hard.She gasped at the swift invasion, the lovely feeling, and then his face was next to hers, his big palms cradling her cheeks.“What I want,” he drawled, “is ye. Nothin’ else.

~ Elizabeth Hoyt

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

~ Pat Conroy

I listen to silence. And you have a lot to say. Although I haven't quite figured out what it is yet....I promise not to delve into what makes your silence so loud, if you promise not to walk out on me.

~ Rebecca Donovan

poets. have the toughest jobin the universe-of turning silenceinto eloquence.

~ Sanober Khan

The silence is so deep it hurts our ears

~ Haruki Murakami

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

~ Marcel Proust

It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

~ Mark Lawrence

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence I love you.

~ Richard O. Moore