Silence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

contempt loves the silence
it thrives in the dark
with fine winding tendrils
that strangle the heart
they say that promises
sweeten the blow
but I don't need them
no, I don't need them

Natalie Merchant

How sweetly did they float upon the wings Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night, At every fall smoothing the raven down Of darkness till it smil'd!

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

If you listen long enough — or is it deep enough? — the silence of a lover can speak plainer than any words! Only you must know how to listen. Pain must have taught you how.

Phyllis Bottome

The worst part was the silence. Death was supposed to be loud — gunshots, explosions, screams and thunder. Not this eerie quiet that wrapped around me like a shroud.

Deep in the soul, below pain, below all the distraction of life, is a silence vast and grand - an infinite ocean of calm, which nothing can disturb; Nature's own exceeding peace, which "passes understanding". That which we seek with passionate longing, here and there, upward and outward; we find at last within ourselves.

Richard Maurice Bucke

The referee told me this league has never had a brawl of that magnitude," said Mr. Penderwick after a long, painful silence. "Of course, at the time I was pretending to be a casual passerby and not a father at all.

Jeanne Birdsall

Lo! all in silence, all in order stand,
And mighty folios first, a lordly band;
Then quartos their well-ordered ranks maintain,
And light octavos fill a spacious plain.

These attempts to silence women and the men who support them have clearly failed. I know this because I have received so many messages of support from across the country — women and men speaking out because they agree that contraception needs to be treated as a basic health care service.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

To-day's house makes tomorrow's road;
I knew these heaps of stone
When they were walls of grace and might,
The country's honour, art's delight
That over fountain'd silence show'd
Fame's final bastion.

See for me, it's immediate. Silence is so freaking loud.' This seemed either deep or deeply oxymoronic. I wasn't sure which.

J.D. cleared his throat and pushed the button on the intercom. Uh, Payton, hi. It's J.D. Dead silence. Then another crackle. Sorry. Not interested. Cute. But J.D. persisted. Again with the button. I want to talk to you. Crackle. Ever hear of a telephone, asshole? Okay, he probably deserved that.

There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev.

Douglas Coupland

You burn the paper, but not the words. You silence the words, but not the thoughts. You kill the thoughts only if you kill the man. And you will find that his thoughts rise again in the minds of others - twice as strong as before.

There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness. When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.

It's only in silence that you can judge of your relationship to a person.

Dorothy Richardson

This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.

Richard Rodriguez

A day will come when everything in my life will be changed, when I shall do good to others, when some one will love me, when I shall give my whole heart to the man who gives me his; meanwhile, I will suffer in silence and keep my love as a reward for him who shall set me free.

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 isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

Margaret Atwood

I appeal to you, therefore, that a man like this stands not only before the bar of this court, but stands before the bar of the high court of History… Long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil and this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone his words will be echoed and re-echoed not only in India but across distant seas and lands.

Chittaranjan Das

Never forget the power of silence, the massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.

So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to silence.