c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It is finally about the quality of the conversations and silences we share, isn't it? We become strangers when we have nothing to say to each other. We die to each other, when the conversations in us die. Sometimes, a little every day, until one day we go completely silent and we are simply left looking at a stranger whose habits we know
— Srividya Srinivasan
Your silence is loudest to those who love you most.
— Steve Maraboli
Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent.
— Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
You whispered softly in the ear of my joyous heart.You know what's on my mind, you've heard my thoughts.I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Darkness is a kind of visual silence, and monks love it.
— Matthew Kelty
In fact, the room was so quiet you might have heard a drop of paint splash.
— Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey
And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed to enter and move familiarly through the house. The wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool danger. It was necessary to do what?...to talk.("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")
— Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories
It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
The thing that seemed like silence must have been the endless cry of all the crickets and locusts in the world, rising and falling.("The Wide Net")
— Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories
In the absence of uplifting words, Silence is the best choice.
— Joan Ambu
In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.
— Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread Crumbs
I fuckin eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life afterlife and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a teara new kittenhead grows out of me.
— Patricia Lockwood, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
There is a rest that comes when you live out of your sound. Silence is no longer something to be avoided. It signifies a soul at rest.
— Suzette R. Hinton
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Silence is where my demons lurk, taunting me endlessly day after day until the end of time...yet still I wait, revelling in their company...
— Virginia Alison
Silence is the best reply to those who provoke you. Smile is like icing on the cake.
— Saru Singhal
You need to train yourself to be comfortable with silence, particularly when dealing with cultures that respect silence more than we do in the West.
— Tony Buon, The Leadership Coach
I never spoke — unless addressed —And then, 'twas brief and low —I could not bear to live — aloud —The Racket shamed me so —And if it had not been so far —And any one I knewWere going — I had often thoughtHow noteless — I could die —
— Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
The silence rings—it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible—I hear the unspeakable.
— Henry David Thoreau, The Quotable Thoreau
I've ceased to smile long ago, The bitter winds now chill my lips, Another hope was just let go, Another song was added since. Against my will, I'll cede this song To people's laughter and offense, Because love's silence for the soul Is too unbearably immense.
— Anna Akhmatova, White Flock
But as the years passed, Ned's silence grew and grew. It pressed upon his face and his body. It leaked into the house and spread outward into the yard. His silence had weight. It had substance and presence and teeth.
— Kelly Barnhill, The Witch's Boy
The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.
— Henry David Thoreau, The Quotable Thoreau
It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence: this, I think, is not something Colombe is capable of understanding, because her inner space is as chaotic and noisy as the street outside.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Words cant explain everything.But silence never fails to mean something
— Anonymous
You have family, only a brother you clearly don't like to speak about. Fine. That's all right." She ran her fingers through her hair. "But don't ever say dreams are a waste. It's a miracle I can still speak of dreams and futures after all I've been through. There's love in this world, Thristan, love that can encompass the heart abiding in humans' mortal, fragile bodies. And there are stupid little humans like me, dreamers, who believe one day they'll find it.
— Madison Thorne Grey, Silence
Such anger. Do you want to talk about it?" Vincent called out. When there was no reply, Vincent picked up the whistling where he'd left off, smiling at the success of wreaking havoc on Darius. Vincent didn't hate Darius, or any other Gwarda for that matter, he simply got pleasure from messing with the race.
— Madison Thorne Grey, Silence
Why are we embarassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time as if he didn't trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.
— Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance
Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.
— Sylvia Plath
Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.
— Henry David Thoreau, The Quotable Thoreau
The real in us is silent
—  the acquired is talkative.
It occurred to me that no words by the tongue of man can express the simplicities of a quiet land, so I returned to the river.
— Daniel J. Rice, The Unpeopled Season: Journal from a North Country Wilderness
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
When the mind is silent, you can listen to your heart and remember that everything is Love and that you are that Love.
— Human Angels, We are human angels
A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two
— Chaim Potok, The Chosen
The question is there in each silence. The question is there in the space between you. But you cannot bring it aloud.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
You are never alone,your Angels always whisper to your heart.By silencing your mind,you can be filled with their Love.
— Human Angels, 365 Wisdom Pills
Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence make us complicit.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
I totally allow myselfto feel every emotion,whatever it isand I observe itfrom my inner spaceof love and silence.
— Human Angels, 365 Mantras for today
Silence is golden...but in times of tyranny it is blood red
— Parag Tipnis
The silence was pregnant with noise, with muted fury, with questions the father found too disgusting to frame and with answers to which the son was incapable of giving voice.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
Thinking belongs to duality. Love belongs to the Oneness. There is no thought without judgment, there is no Unconditional Love without the silence of the mind.
— Human Angels, We are human angels
For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic bomb was dropped, did not have the movable type for 'atomic bomb' or 'radioactivity'. The silence continued so long because the U.S. Army Surgeons Investigation Team in the fall of 1945 had issued a mistaken statement: all people expected to die from the radiation effects of the atomic bomb had by then already died; accordingly, no further cases of physiological effects due to residual radiation would be acknowledged.
— Kenzaburō Ōe
Clear your mind and you will be filled by the Love of the Oneness.
— Human Angels, We are human angels
-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things--sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains. . . . Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited.
— John Graves
Quiet, by its nature, slips away unnoticed. But once it's gone, we notice.
— Susan  Marsh, A Hunger for High Country: One Woman's Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country
A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode.
— Truman Capote
Silence has always been my default mode—my best defense against the rest of the world.
— Matthew Quick, Boy21
Like hatred, guilt can’t be locked in the silence of forgetting, without taking part of your soul with it.
— Shannon L. Alder
Silence is not empty or immaterial, and it is not needed to chain tame things. It often guards powers strong enough to shatter everything.
— Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water
Will people not be thrown face down into Hell only on account of the harvest of their tongue?
— Anonymous
We didn't talk much, and the silence hung like a silk curtain, light and lovely.
— Katherine Reay, Dear Mr. Knightley
I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.
— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
If silences could be pregnant, then this one went to full term.
— Alison Weir
She drifted down into the water, letting it engulf her body until even her face was underwater. The silence was delicious, just the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears.
— Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope
Christmas
—  silence breathed childlike anticipation in your heart.
In general, silence often reflects ambiguity on the part of the listener as the observer wishes to understand the other's experience.
— Sandra Leanne Bosacki
Sarah...loved the way the light lit the silence first thing in the morning.
— Niamh Boyce, The Herbalist
Of silence, I can say only what I heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave–and so speech isn’t itself, but its effect, and silence is the same.
— Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun
I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.
— Christopher Hitchens
There is a presence, a silence, a stillness which is here by itself. There is no doer of it, no creator of this stillness. It is simply here in you, with you. It is the fragrance of your own self. There is nothing to do about this, it is naturally present. This fragrance of peace, this spaciousness, it is the fragrance of your own being.
— Mooji
An observer can’t tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
When the owl sings, the night is silent. (Quand le hibou chante, La nuit est silence)
— Charles de Leusse
People reveal as much by their silence as they do by what they say.
— Sandra Brown, Deadline
When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...
— Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
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, Mother, Don't Lock Me In That Closet!
But sometimes, things are better to just hear. Some questions better left unasked. Some words better left unsaid. Because saying them doesn’t make you matter any less.
— A. Lynn, Itsy's Ugly
The true hero trains himself in silence.
— Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The constant talker will never, or a least rarely, grasp truth. Of course even he must experience some truths, otherwise he could not exist. He does notice certain facts, observe certain relations, draw conclusions and make plans. But he does not yet possess genuine truth, which comes into being only when the essence of an object, the significance of a relaton, and what is valid and eternal in this world reveal themselves. This requires the spacousness, freedom, and pure receptiveness of that inner “clean-swept room” whilch silence alone can create
— Romano Guardini
the silence people, hear everything.
— Silence
We are starved for quiet, to hear the sound of sheer silence that is the presence of God himself.
— Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence
If there is silence between us, please be the one who breaks it.
— Daniel Englisch
I went to a concert upstairs in Town Hall. The composer whose works were being performed had provided program notes. One of these notes was to the effect that there is too much pain in the world. After the concert I was walking along with the composer and he was telling me how the performances had not been quite up to snuff. So I said, "Well, I enjoyed the music, but I didn't agree with that program note about there being too much pain in the world." He said, "What? Don't you think there's enough?" I said, "I think there's just the right amount.
— John Cage
Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
The silence sat down with them like an invisible creature with its finger to its lips.
— Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
She says his eyes address her like the silence of the snow.
— Ronald H Peat
When you believe your lie, it will curse your life forever.
— Robert Ahaness, Goddess In The Silence
Even the proud in all their boasting, must fall silent before the wise.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
I always thought I was an extrovert until I became a theatre major. Then I realised I just didn't like silence.
— Cora Carmack, Losing It
The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Shush – it’s silent time again.
— Carla H. Krueger, Sleeping with the Sun
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, The Crime of Julian Wells
Connection with yourself only comes in moments of silence.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Peace is the friend we find in silence.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The act of silence is wisdom for ignoring a provoking situation.
— Lailah GiftyAkita
Often the most effective statement we can make in a noisy world is to say nothing at all. Don't waste your words over something or to someone who deserves silence.
— Chris Vonada
He wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn't. But they had silence, and not many people had that.
— Nick Harkaway, Tigerman
All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried over the walls.
— Sherwood Anderson, Poor White
The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence.
— Chaim Potok, The Chosen
If she'd just kept her mouth shut, she would have been perfect, but no...
— Jennifer Crusie, What the Lady Wants
At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape."Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped . . . It feels like a kind of weird - just weird, man. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like - you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid," he said.Likening instances of being flustered or uneasy to the often life-shattering experience of rape has become a far too common comparison in modern lexicon.The phrase "Facebook rape" is perhaps the most widely used, which implies one person has posted on another person's Facebook account - usually something intended to embarrass the person.But the casual, flippant use of the term "rape" in instances that do not involve sexual violence is highly problematic in that it trivialises one of the most despicable invasions of a human being.Desensitising the masses to the term "rape" is just another way the conversation surrounding sexual assault is derailed or diluted in society.Rape is, and should be considered universally, as a serious societal sickness that occurs within the "toxic silence" that surrounds sexual assault as Tara Moss put so elegantly in her recent Q&A appearance.Further to that, the use of the term can be a trigger for rape survivors in that it may jolt terrifying memories of their own experience.According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, up to 57 per cent of rape survivors suffer post-traumatic stress disorder in their lifetime, with "triggers" including inflammatory words like rape causing deeply traumatic recollections.Beware desensitising the term "rape", Newcastle Herald, June 6, 2014
— Emma Elsworth
... listening to the silence together. If there’s any. I truly believe not so. I have never heard a silence. Have you? The world is filled with unspoken words. And that’s something different isn’t it.
— Anna Jae
In silence there is a perfection which any toil injures.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Silence is best reserved for the fearful and foolish.
— Shannon L. Alder
A closed mouth catches no flies.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Words were his delight; Hers, a gay gracefulnessOf dancing and moving. But when to the place Of deep loving (Starlight at midnight)At last they came, Their full communion And consummation,Their complete sphere,Was stillness for her,Silence for him.
— Theodore Spencer
But the night doesn't swallow her up.Everywhere she goes she is still there
— the silence is as big as herself.
In my silence do I enhance my talents
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Distinctive Footprints of Life: Where Are You Heading Towards?
sometimes being silent is the best way to appreciate the moment
— Kiran  Joshi, Beyond forever...in love
Silence is the sublime refuge of your divine.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong -- who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?
— Larry Watson, Let Him Go
Silence is more than observation
—  it informs from non-observation.
The quiet between them had gone on for far too long now to pretend it was anything other than what it was. There were no more words
—  all that was left were two faintly beating hearts.
And then something happened. It was a fragment of time, a breath of time. It was like being in a car in pouring rain and driving under an overpass, and for just that second there is a profound, powerful sense of reprieve- the utter silence of non-rain.
— Jaclyn Moriarty, A Corner of White
There have been extensive human rights violations by American psychiatrists over the last 70 years. These doctors were pad by the American taxpayer through CIA and military contracts. It is past time for these abuses to stop, it is past time for a reckoning, and it is past time for individual doctors to be held accountable. The Manchurian Candidate Programs are of much more than "historical" interest. ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH are precursors of mind control programs that are operational in the twenty first century. Human rights violations by psychiatrists must be ongoing in programs like COPPER GREEN, the interrogation program at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Such programs must be carried out within CIA units like Task Force 121 (The Dallas Morning News, December 1, 2004, p. 1A). Information pointing to ongoing human rights violations by psychiatrists is available in publications like The New Yorker (see article by Seymour M. Hersh, May 24, 2004). Yes the indifference, silence, denial, and disinformation of organized medicine and psychiatry continue. One purpose of The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists is to break that silence.
— Colin A. Ross, The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists
There was something in the color white that resembled silence. Both were emptied of life.
— Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul
He was probably being so quiet because he was trying not to say it out loud.
— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
We sat and drank in silence. It was something I appreciated about Jesse. He didn't feel the need to fill every moment with talk or some sort of silly exchange.
— Ruta Sepetys, Out of the Easy
Everyone is quiet. Which is the wooooooorst. It’s scary when a group of people all know instinctively not to joke around.
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
In reality I said nothing at all, but I heard a murmur, something gone wrong with the silence, and I pricked up my ears, like an animal I imagine, which gives a start and pretends to be dead.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
There’s comfort in hearing a voice when the world is silent.
— Shannon Wiersbitzky, What Flowers Remember
Once I knew nothing about McKay and now I knew everything about him. This seemed as good as any reason for not walking out the door. There are so many ways to stop the knowing, and I tried them all. I tried silence, I tried heroin, I tried calling it love. And then I stopped trying to call my dumbness any one of ten thousand names.
— Alice Hoffman, Property Of
Most times, the best thing people deserve from us is our silence.speak through silence and it will be more powerful than harsh words
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Distinctive Footprints of Life: Where Are You Heading Towards?
It was hard to listen to her all the time without getting to say anything back
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The more time that passes without an answer and the longer we wander through the wilderness of silence and shadow, the more fearful we become that maybe God isn't all we have believed him to be. It's in those moments that Satan plants in us the temptation to 'throw away this confident trust in the Lord.' The enemy wants us to forget 'the great reward it brings you' (Hebrews 10:35).
— Kasey Van Norman, Raw Faith: What Happens When God Picks a Fight
They still didn’t talk on the bus, but it had become a less confrontational silence. Almost friendly. (But not quite.)
— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
Hudson looks at me, waiting for what I was trying to say, but no matter how many times I try, the words won’t come. My chest contracts, and panic knocks my thoughts into disarray faster than a tornado.For years, I was silent by choice. Now, choking and straining and silently screaming, I actually know what it’s like to be silenced.
— Erica Cameron, Sing Sweet Nightingale
sometimes, silence can be very loud
— Lorraine Heath, Always to Remember
The acrid odor of overloaded circuitry permeated the air, the horrid smell witness that at least one of his senses was working as sights and sounds became one with the unknown. Eventually he collapsed to the floor, wondering if he'd wake up in mortality. Then the muddled spectra went black, the silence that followed only possible in the deepest sectors of space. Or death.
— Marcha A. Fox, Beyond the Hidden Sky
I don't want to stand in naked silence, pathetically unaware of how to be.
— Markus Zusak
You don't talk much, do you, angel-face? I like that in a woman.
— Susan Andersen, Be My Baby
Wheels turning, the motorcycle’s roar grows steady, which, too, is a form of silence.
— Roger Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness
Give me a literary love that doesn't need words, that flows like silent water and speaks to the bone. There I lose myself in the fantasy.
— Julie Harvey Delcourt, Rook and Raven
The very first part in healing is shattering the silence,
— Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness
Stigma's power lies in silence. The silence that persists when discussion and action should be taking place. The silence one imposes on another for speaking up on a taboo subject, branding them with a label until they are rendered mute or preferably unheard.
— M.B. Dallocchio
Keep anyone with whom you can read in silence.
— Lemony Snicket
What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
The silence, she thought, was remarkable: a perfect, shimmering thing, and fragile. Like glass, if it shattered, it would never come back together again.
— Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight
Because it is so hard, some people wait until they are in their thirties, forties, fifties, or even older before breaking their silence.
— Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness
Sharing silence between us. Sometimes is all you can share.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.
— Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems
Seated at table - no need for the fracture of the room's silence
—  noiselessly they conversed.
M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Silence is the speech of the spiritual seeker.
— Sathya Sai Baba
The Holy Spirit does not speak to a soul that is distracted and garrulous. He speaks by His quiet inspirations to a soul that is recollected, to a soul that knows how to keep silence.
— Maria Faustina Kowalska, Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul
Try to relax. Sometimes the best offense is a good defense.
— Becca Fitzpatrick
I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.
— Ishmael Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow
You would do well to guard your tongue, lest it be stricken from you.
— Nenia Campbell, Bleeds My Desire
Silence promotes the presence of God, prevents many harsh and proud words, and suppresses many dangers in the way of ridiculing or harshly judging our neighbors ... If you are faithful in keeping silence when it is not necessary to speak, God will preserve you from evil when it is right for you to talk.
— François Fénelon
It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude... nothing in between..
— Sanhita Baruah
It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words to silence.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
silence was never lost, she just had to stop screaming long enough to hear it:.
— Kathryn Dyche Dechairo, The Edge Of Silence
Silence has built walls, walls that I attempt to break by pedaling faster, only to be imprisoned a hundred feet down the road.
— Doug   Cooper, Outside In
The feeling cannot be described in words, it's mystical; I am changing. Perhaps the soul needed silence so that it can shout to hear the echo from the walls of my heart. It did heard something, Sufism!
— Dr. S.U.A.H Syed
Usually when I enter a bookstore, I feel immediately calm. Bookstores are, for me, what churches are for other people. My breath gets slower and deeper as I peruse the shelves. I believe that books contain messages I am meant to receive. I’m not normally superstitious, but I’ve even had books fall from shelves and land at my feet. Books are my missives from the universe.
— Laurie Horowitz, The Family Fortune
He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.
— Colm Tóibín, The Master
In love, you can sometimes feel a melting and merging with the other person, and the two becomes one. The physical bodies are still separate, but something beyond the bodies creates a oneness. It opens a spiritual dimension.
— Swami Dhyan Giten
On a ship, knowing when to be silent is just as important as knowing when to speak.
— J.Z. Colby, Journey
Silence is a deadly weapon
— M TERESA CLAYTON
I didn't know silence could be that loud.
— Nicole  Williams
Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn’t a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can’t, I won’t, because to save her once isn’t to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn’t silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can’t hear you.
— Peter Orner, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
When the sounds of the world around you vanish, what is left but screaming silence.
— Markus Peterson
Maybe they hurt so much that the only way they can say it, is to say nothing
— Matthew Dicks, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend
...there are times when silence is a poem.
— John Fowles, The Magus
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wantingSo much as just finding the gold.It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,It's the forests where silence has lease;It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,It's the stillness that fills me with peace.
— Robert W. Service
Incest, rape and abuse is rampant everywhere, even in our churches, but society is silent. It is a silent epidemic. One in three women will experience a sexual assault in her lifetime and one in six males, yet we don't speak of it, even in our churches!
— Diane Chamberlain, Conduct Unbecoming: Rape, Torture, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Military Commanders
You'll learn. Silence and apathy are the best ways of saying Fuck You
— Anonymous
Do not take someone's silence as his pride,perhaps he is busy fighting with his self
— Ali Ibn Abi Taleb
The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.
— Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence
When sounds of the world around you vanish, what is left but screaming silence.
— Markus Peterson
Silent people are those who have too much to say
— Nicholas C. Rossis, Rise of the Prince
Our young people, raised under the old rules of courtesy, never indulged in the present habit of talking incessantly and all at the same time. To do so would have been not only impolite, but foolish; for poise, so much admired as a social grace, could not be accompanied by restlessness. Pauses were acknowledged gracefully and did not cause lack of ease or embarrassment.
— Kent Nerburn, The Wisdom of the Native Americans: Including The Soul of an Indian and Other Writings of Ohiyesa and the Great Speeches of Red Jacket, Chief Joseph, and Chief Seattle
Silence can symbolize many things; fear, anger, sadness, or shame. But one thing that silence cannot symbolize is happiness because silence is dark, silence is quiet, silence is everything happiness should not acquire.
— Keysi
Don't Ignore Silence Cause It Has A Sound. When It Starts Speaking, Its Louder Than Thousand Volcanoes....
— Muhammad Imran Hasan
To Hear What Silence Is Saying, You Must Have Inner Peace. A Violent Mind Can’t Understand It....
— Muhammad Imran Hasan
Silence is the best defence for any argument.
— Sukant Ratnakar, Open The Windows: To the World around You
The ambiance of solitude, the absence of any disturbing noise and of worldly desires and images, the quiet and calm attention of the mind to God, helped by prayer and leisurely reading, flow into that "quies" or "rest" of the soul in God. A simple and joyful rest, full of God, that leads the monk to feel, in some way, the beauty of eternal life.
— Carthusian Monks
when the presence is like thunderstorm , the absence prevail deep dark silence.
— Upasana Banerjee
Silence is an arguement hard to refute
— Anonymous
The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.
— Mccann Colum
...what an unfair advantage the dead had over the living, for there could be no rebuttal, no denial, nothing but the accusing silence of the grave.
— Sharon Kay Penman, The Reckoning
It's a silence I know. The kind that's actually a sound so loud your brain doesn't know how to interpret it at first.
— Cristin Terrill, All Our Yesterdays
In this landI have made myself sick with silenceIn this landI have wandered, lostIn this landI hunkered down to seeWhat will become of me.In this landI held myself tightSo as not to scream.-But I did scream, so loudThat this land howled back at meAs hideouslyAs it builds its houses.In this landI have been sownOnly my head sticksDefiant, out of the earthBut one day it too will be mownMaking me, finallyOf this land.-Charlie's poem
— Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
I love the smell of my mother’s hair after she washes it.I love the feel of the scratchy stubble on my father’s face before he shaves.But I’ve never been able to tell them.
— Sharon M. Draper, Out of My Mind
How devastating it is to be thought of as arrogant. Surely, we have known each other long enough and well enough, for her to understand that my silence only reflects my sense of trust and satisfaction.
— Barbara Hodgson, The Tattooed Map
There was silence in her head and silence beneath her window, and still she could not sleep.
— Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken
nothing is lifelesswhen the moon writes its screedon the silvern sand silence-From the poem:"The Universe In Blossom
— Munia Khan
Tut, tut! I have often admonished my pupils to count ten before speaking. Were I you, Mr. Philander, I should count at least a thousand, and then maintain a discreet silence.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
Every time you walk lonely, you get a very special gift: The silence!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Only the deceased could hear this quietness, he thought; no wonder they were tossing and turning in their graves seven feet under the ground – they cannot take it, they want out.
— Nina -, Johnny Kiddow
And the wind falls silent, and the birds fall silent, and the wild cherry trees no longer shiver and creek.
— Daniel Arsand, Lovers
[T]he deepest form of pain comes out as silence.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
The silence wasn't uncomfortable or hostile but exhausted--the quiet of people who have a great deal to think about but not a hell of a lot to say.
— Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
the silence of God is God.
— Carolyn Forché, The Angel of History
When you're silent, your silence condones it. Thus, whatever you believe in goes down the drain.
— Jennifer Tindugan-Adoviso
There is unmistakable proof that abusers do get together in order to share children, abuse more children, and even learn from each other. As more cases have come into the public eye in recent years, this has become increasingly obvious. More and more of this type of abuse is coming to light.I definitely think it is the word ritual which causes people to question, to feel uncomfortable, or even just disbelieve. It seems almost incredible that such things would happen, but too many of us know exactly how bad the lives of many children are. A great deal of child pornography shows children being abused in a ritualised setting, and many have now come forward to share their experiences, but there is a still tendency to say it just couldn't happen.Why not?Why, given what we now know about paedophiles and about what they do to children? Would they have limits? It was all done to me and I have enough experiences to write many more books than this one, but this will have to do for now. I've tried to make sense of it and I've tried to tell you my story in a way that will, hopefully, let you understand how it was done, and how they managed to get away with it, but I haven't told you a big part of it yet. I haven't told you what happened that finally ended it all for me.There was something else.When I was eight, someone else came into my life and made a huge difference to what was happening and how things would turn out. I didn't know it then, but I see the whole picture now.Something I have often wondered is whether Andrew was there while I was being abused. Lots of people hide their faces, and there were often masks worn, so he certainly could have been. I have no evidence one way or another though, so I will leave it to the reader to decide whether it would seem in a paedophile's character to watch abuse continue when it has been masterminded by him. But I do know that it wasn't just me who he abused - I know that because I saw it.Andrew was away a lot with the Army until I was at high school, then he left that position. He was instrumental both in my abuse and in setting the scene, but when I was eight, something happened which would distract him and which would, at times, take his attention from me. My mother very kindly provided him with a new victim - my little sister.
— Laurie Matthew, Groomed: An Uncle Who Went Too Far, a Mother Who Didn't Care, a Little Girl Who Waited for Justice
...she thought with pity of all the men and women who were not light-hearted when they loved, who were cold, who were reluctant, who were shy, who imagined that passion and tenderness were two things separate from one another, and not the one, gloriously intermingled, so that to be fierce was also to be gentle, so that silence was a speaking without words.
— Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman's Creek
...music, music, records, records, noise to cover silence.
— A.P., Sabine
Chester's playing filled the station. Like ripples around a stone dropped into still water, the circles of silence spread out from the newsstand. And as people listened, a change came over their faces. Eyes that looked worried grew soft and peaceful; tongues left off chattering; and ears full of the city's rustling were rested by the cricket's melody.
— George Selden, The Cricket in Times Square
By this time he had discovered that his neighbour was not very conversible; But whether her silence proceeded from pride, discretion, timidity, or idiotism, he was still unable to decide.
— Matthew      Lewis, The Monk
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Being busy is a distraction and I am sure that doing nothing, resting and sleeping are all good cures for modern life. I am not suggesting we all do nothing but sleep, however, sometimes stopping long enough to 'be' can be very powerful.
— Joanna Runciman, The Radiant Woman's Handbook
A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.
— Patrick McGrath, Dr. Haggard's Disease
...having nothing better to do, meandered off to a coffee shop and sat facing each other for a couple of hours, neither of them talking much but each coming to the general conclusion that the other was a person rather like himself...
— Ryū Murakami, Popular Hits of the Showa Era
Silence is fine if I am on my own but it's not overly sociable if my husband is around!
— Joanna Runciman, The Radiant Woman's Handbook
The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
For the sea to be silent, wind must be silent, earthquake must be silent, boat must be silent, fish must be silent; behind every silence, there lies the silence of everything!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There's something to be said about silence; it can be a moment of truth, or a moment of connection to other like minded people.
— Martin R. Lemieux
It's quiet in the car, in a good way for once. No words, no music. Silence seems right. I roll down the windows and lean my head against the door frame, listening to the wind rush by and smelling the pine trees. I watch the stars materialize, like someone is dimming the switch on the night sky so each shining dot grows brighter and brighter.
— Jennifer Salvato Doktorski, How My Summer Went Up in Flames
Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
— Luce Irigaray, To Be Two
She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.
— Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
and only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn’t an answer.
— Michael Marshall Smith, Spares
I miss the snow. I miss looking at it, walking in it, tasting it. I used to love those days when it was so cold everyone else would be tucked away inside trying to stay warm. I would be the only one out walking, so I could look across the fields and see miles of snow without a single footprint in it. It would be completely silent -- no cars, no birds singing, no doors slamming. Just silence and snow. God, I miss snow. The stars, the moon, the wind, and blankets of pure, pristine snow.
— Damien Echols, Life After Death
We sit, silent, the comfortable way only good friends can sit.
— Alex Flinn, Cloaked
There was nothing you could be sure about, it was all lies, and it was all done to mess with minds because the control and the power trip was so important to them, as well as it being necessary in terms of screwing up anything you might remember from an evidential perspective.They would also build up your hopes, in terms of any tiny thing you did like or were less scared of, so I'd be told that it would be a nice night because Uncle Andrew would be coming, but then it wouldn't be him. There would be someone else There would be someone else who I was told was my Uncle Andrew as he was raping me. Sometimes, this other person would have a mask on but I would know that it wasn't really him. They would be the wrong height or the wrong weight or, sometimes, even obviously a woman. There were occasions when I would be told to call the person Uncle Andrew and then when I did, they would ask me why I was doing that. Sometimes he would be there, too, but that was rare.Was it Satanic? I don't know. Personally I don't believe in God or Satan or any of those things, but abusers use whatever they can to silence children because if you go to the police and say something about Satan, you are so much less likely to be believed. I personally think they were just a group of likeminded people who had no beliefs other than that they wanted to get satisfaction out of abusing children and it's as simple and horrible as that. My uncle certainly doesn't have any satanic beliefs — he just thinks that he loves children and is allowed to get sexual satisfaction from them. Why is there sex involved if it is just about Satan? Why does it always come down to them getting off? No matter what they do that's all it is, whether masturbation or penetration or humiliation, that's what it's about. I encountered people who just liked to humiliate — they wouldn't allow you to go to the bathroom, you would be given drink after drink, fizzy drinks, whatever, so you ended up absolutely desperate and that's where they got off — that's when they started to masturbate themselves, as you stood there peeing yourself. That was just awful, so humiliating. Where is God or Satan in that?(her Uncle was convicted for abusing her and jailed)
— Laurie Matthew, Groomed: An Uncle Who Went Too Far, a Mother Who Didn't Care, a Little Girl Who Waited for Justice
On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers’ hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar.
— Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart