If we don't bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.
The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence.
I love silence. But I usually only listen to that when I'm sleeping.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
The most profound statements are often said in silence.
The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.
I aspire only to silence.
I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.
Silence may be golden, but can you think of a better way to entertain someone than to listen to him?
Let the veil of silence fall presently over what happened afterwards. Silence, too, can speak out.
The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.
And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.
If there's a silence in a room I'll try to fill it as soon as humanly possible.
When you ask someone a question and they're slow to respond, don't feel pressure to move the conversation forward. Remaining silent plays to your advantage. Moments of silence make people feel as though they should speak, especially when the ball is in their court. This is a great tool to use in negotiations and other difficult conversations.
Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.
A moment of silence is not inherently religious.
He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.
At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue - there's this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.
A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.
Sometimes you don't have to say anything. Silence speaks it all.
I work in silence.
Less is always more. The best language is silence. We live in a time of a terrible inflation of words, and it is worse than the inflation of money.
There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.
Silence is a true friend who never betrays.
To silence criticism is to silence freedom.
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
The silence caused by politicizing speech is deafening.
And now there is merely silence, silence, silence, saying all we did not know.
And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.
When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.
