Silence Quotes - Page 106

They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.

The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.

I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.

Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines-'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.

The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues; it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.

One's attention has to penetrate the chaotic activity, pass through all the layers of subtle thought, and at last emerge into silence. This is the basic process of transcending.

The snow did not even whisper its way to earth, but seemed to salt the night with silence.

When we spend time in silence, we can hear the voice of our soul whispering its sacred message and encouraging us to make choices that bring us more happiness, health, love, meaning, and peace.

Reading requires a loner's temperament, a high tolerance for silence, and an unhealthy preference for the company of people who are imaginary or dead.

They don’t have silences together; they have noise. Mostly his.

you’d think that silence would be peaceful. but really, it’s painful.

The world is quieter now. It is never quiet, but it can get quieter. What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread. Nighttime is not that. Nighttime still rustles, still creaks and whispers and trembles in its throat. It is not darkness we fear, but our own helplessness within it. How merciful to have been granted the other senses.

I think they have compatible silences.

The guilty are uncomfortable with silence.

There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. that it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty.

When I read John Cage's book Silence, I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. For me, records were a mode of time travel and geographic travel, interfacing with a much larger world. So it seemed antiquated and backwards that Cage would be so down on them.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

I'm familiar with that feeling of silence that comes with a very imminent catastrophe, when you know you have absolutely no control over a situation.

Digging a ditch where madness gives a bit Digging a ditch where silence lives Digging a ditch for when I'm old Digging this ditch my story's told Where all these troubles weigh down on me will rise ..... Where all these questions spinning round my head will die

... and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

People are never quiet. It's go, go, go. I'm a go-getter, but you need rest and silence, just to sit around and think about things.

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

She saved my life...and I’ve ruined hers. They sat in silence for a full minute, the air between them growing heavy, as if they both wanted to speak, and yet had nothing to say. They were strangers, after all, on a brief and bizarre journey that had just reached a fork in the road, each of them now needing to find seperate paths.

Even Merrick Garland can't get up and give a press conference in which he says, "Give me a damn vote." We just hear silence.