Top 100 Silences Quotes
#1. Only a man of inner silences becomes a creator. And we need more and more creative people in the world. Their very creativity, their very silence, their very love, their very peace will be the only way to protect this beautiful planet.
Rajneesh
#2. Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde
#3. When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.
David Leavitt
#4. We try to abolish intervals by our manic insistence on keeping busy, on doing something. And as a result, all we succeed in doing is destroying all hope of tranquility ... You have to learn to immerse yourself in the silences between.
Lyall Watson
#5. 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.
Quentin Tarantino
#6. But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing - come to California.
Denis Johnson
#7. Even in the most beautiful music there are some silences, which are there so we can witness the importance of silence.
Andrea Bocelli
#8. He loops his arm over my shoulder and we watch the waves in silence. We've had so many silences between us these last few months, bitter ones, loaded ones, empty ones, and hurtful ones. This one is perfect. It says things that words can't.
Lindsey Leavitt
#9. There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.
Anais Nin
#10. All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.
Bell Hooks
#11. Wine is not a magic serum of truth. It just silences that smart little voice in your head which advises against saying some dumb shit.
David Alejandro Fearnhead
#12. That is the problem with age and wisdom - it merely shows you how helpless you are. The wiser you become, the more you learn to keep your mouth shut, until eventually the grave silences you forever.
Bill Bonner
#14. It's not enough to listen to their words. You have to mine their silences for buried ore. It's often only in the lies that we refuse to speak that truth can be heard at all.
Karen Marie Moning
#15. The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.
Pattiann Rogers
#16. A seeker of silences am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence?
Kahlil Gibran
#17. We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother's funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn't work.
Donna Tartt
#18. Silences seem longer in darkness. I think it's because it's harder to lie when the lights are off. There's a rawness that only belongs to the night and the truth can't help but be set free.
Katie McGarry
#19. She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life.
Thomas H. Cook
#20. At the end of the day, the only people a One Voice doctrine silences are those who should be the most loyal.
Tony Dungy
#21. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition.
Nicole Krauss
#22. Ibrahim feels an overwhelming desire for her, for the soft of her body, the warmth of it. This urge silences the other voice in his mind, the one that asks insistently, and seeks, and seeks.
Parnaz Foroutan
#23. He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.
Geraldine Brooks
#24. Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!
Thomas Merton
#25. An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year ... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.
Charles De Lint
#26. For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.
Susanna Clarke
#27. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker's keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silences.
William Gay
#28. Not everything needs to be said. The silences, the words that aren't spoken, lead us to the questions we should be asking.
David Powning
#29. What will it profit a man if he gains his cause and silences his adversary if at the same time he loses that humble, tender frame of spirit in which the Lord delights, and to which the promise of his presence is made?
John Newton
#30. He craved silences and solitude. He simply could not get lost in another person's life.
Sreesha Divakaran
#31. Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star ...
E. E. Cummings
#32. All she could think of was that
she loved him--everything about
him, from the proud lift of his
gold head to his slender dark
boots, loved his laughter even when
it mystified her, loved his
bewildering silences.
Margaret Mitchell
#34. That's the thing about silences and futures; someone always comes along to fill them in. If you let them.
Carrie Ryan
#35. there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences,
Lauren Groff
#36. Because death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.
Greg Iles
#37. Shut lips, sleeping faces,
Every stopped machine,
The dumb and littered places
Where crowds have been:.
All silences rejoice,
Weep (loudly or low),
Speak-but with the voice
Of whom, I do not know.
Aldous Huxley
#39. When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both.
Christina Baldwin
#40. In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory?
Jamaica Kincaid
#41. Nothing silences us more effectively than shame.
Brene Brown
#42. What about me?" I asked. "Am I mean?" "You aren't mean to me with words," she said. "You're mean to me with your silences.
Sherman Alexie
#43. Your holiness disarms your enemies and silences them.
Sunday Adelaja
#44. Trauma silences a person. It shatters your identity, and along with it, much of what you thought you knew.
Sandra Lee Dennis
#45. There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.
Dean Koontz
#46. I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
Samuel Beckett
#47. Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.
Richard Jackson
#48. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said ... of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
#49. When I finally get out of bed, the only thing I want to do is go straight to Amy and demand her forgiveness. Maybe we can at least go back to what we had before our fight, even if all we had was an awkward friendship punctuated by significant silences.
Beth Revis
#50. For the first time since our fight in Severen, I felt things were right between us. The silences no longer lay around us like holes in the road. I knew it had just been a matter of waiting patiently until the tension passed.
Patrick Rothfuss
#51. What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.
Noreena Hertz
#52. Mark this down if you can. Silences, not just sentences, form the work of pastoral ministry. Wise pastors are listening preachers.
Zack Eswine
#53. Reading was what I needed to beat back all that noise and silence, those horrible silences. . . .An ink pen was the only way to carve a voice out of the air and have others hear it.
Reginald Dwayne Betts
#55. The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.
Elan Mastai
#56. This is it: somehow, in these pictures, the mystery of the accident is contained, and the explanation for Dara's subsequent behavior, for the silences and disappearances. Don't ask me how. I just do. If you don't understand that, I guess you've never had a sister
Lauren Oliver
#58. Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.
Freya Stark
#59. Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.
Mary Webb
#60. First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.
Elizabeth Bowen
#61. Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
Harley King
#62. I think political correctness really does help us when it serves us but it doesn't help us when it silences us.
Margaret Cho
#63. For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout.
Emile Zola
#64. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
C.S. Lewis
#65. Love is like that: insistent, sure, persuasive. It silences easily all whispers of misgiving.
Kate Morton
#66. I discover, too, that grief is different to different people. Comes in many guises. In shocked silences and closed doors around our village, as people try to shut it out. That a blank face or fleeting smile can hide the worst, most private kind of agony.
Debbie Howells
#67. Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them - and that is what apartheid stole from us: time.
Trevor Noah
#69. Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.
Virginia Woolf
#70. Unless the line of a life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses.
Patrick Modiano
#71. Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
M.I.A.
#72. Her hearing was keener than his, and she heard silences he was unaware of.
D.M. Thomas
#73. Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.
Stefan Molyneux
#74. The biggest truths are the ones told after the longest silences
S.E. Sever
#75. An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.
Harriet Lerner
#76. The best justification governments can find to shut down information is that lives are at risk. In fact, lives have been at risk as a result of the silences and lies revealed in these leaks.
Jemima Khan
#77. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
#78. And so the argument was begun, progressing more in the silences than in the speeches, like a chess game played by mail.
Stephen King
#79. Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law.
Seneca The Younger
#80. My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.
Robin Hobb
#82. When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over.
Walker Percy
#83. What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words.
Don DeLillo
#84. Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. For one woman, a college sophomore, "It's very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person." For a senior man, "If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you.
Sherry Turkle
#86. Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.
Pattiann Rogers
#87. When introverts are in conflict with each other ... it may require a map in order to follow all the silences, nonverbal cues and passive-aggressive behaviors!
Adam S. McHugh
#88. I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.
Arthur Rimbaud
#89. It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
Stephane Mallarme
#91. There's a bond that forms over a sink, where the silences seem natural and the conversation is broken up with practical exchanges about where the dishes go or what kind of detergent works best.
Lisa Beazley
#92. Worry is useless. Worry saps our strength and steals our focus. It causes us to be more awestruck and dumbfounded by storms than by the one who silences storms with a word.
Judah Smith
#93. People were flattered to be asked about themselves and if she said nothing after they spoke, it made them say more. They were conditioned to fill silences.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#94. Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.
Lauren Groff
#95. Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I've never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself: is it worth it? And it just isn't.
Miranda July
#96. I never said nothing ... "
"I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You've got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn't dead!
Terry Pratchett
#97. It was one of those problematic occasions with long silences, sporadic coughs, and people saying isolated things like, Well, isn't this nice.
Terry Pratchett
#98. That must be why we get along so fabulously," Amaranthe said. "You being the less talkative sort and me being happy to fill in the awkward silences with ... awkward un-silences." Sicarius said nothing. "Yes, just like that.
Lindsay Buroker
#99. I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.
Eve Ensler
#100. Facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
