Silence Quotes
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We wait - it seems for minutes - looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear... there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.
Peter Greenaway
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My sister is also retarded. Across the board. She's a one hundred per cent, honest to goodness, born that way retard. I learned a long time ago that if you're going to tell a story about your retarded sister, you need to mention she's retarded right off the bat or inevitably, at the end of the story, someone will say, What... is she, retarded? And then you have to go, Uh... yeah, she is. Followed by a lengthy, awkward silence.
Bonnie McFarlane
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I saw old autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like silence, listening To silence.
Thomas Hood
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Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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My grief lies all within,
And these external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
William Shakespeare
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Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indirectly, to all people. This is why we cannot remain silent in the face of evil or violence; silence merely encourages them.
Vaclav Havel
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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.
Angelina Grimke
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From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price, you may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.
Alexander Litvinenko
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Don't you know that silence supports the accuser's charge?
Sophocles
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Silence is Wisdom where Speaking is Folly.
William Penn
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Silence is the residue of fear.
Clint Smith
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I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?
Gabriel Josipovici
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He was a reflection of what was going on. The poem 'Howl' was a howl against the hypocrisy and silence of the generations of the 1950s -- of the people who failed to perform their function as real elders.
B. R. Hayden
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Euripides was wont to say, silence was an answer to a wise man; but we seem to have greater occasion for it in our dealing with fools and unreasonable persons; for men of breeding and sense will be satisfied with reason and fair words.
Plutarch
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It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.
Elena Ferrante
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When you believe in what you are doing, when you are seeking justice for the killing of Daniel Pearl, when you want to alert public opinion to the plight of the massacred people of Darfur, or in the recently martyred former Soviet republic Georgia, it makes more sense to use the media than to work in silence.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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If my energy was fake, then I would feel pressured, because I gotta, like, keep this up. I thank God it's just how I am. But I find myself wanting to work on being more comfortable in the silence with people.
Jonathan Van Ness
