“Reading your sonnets?” asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. “How’d you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you’ve lost your eyes?” “Not yet,” rumbled the Ionian. Orphu’s great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. “Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all.”
Source: Ilium
“People who live in the night are acquainted with all kinds of quiet. There’s quiet enough to hear the distant traffic. Quiet enough to hear your breathing. Quiet enough to hear a lover’s heartbeat. There’s please-god-don’t-let-me-die quiet, and can’t-remember-her-name quiet. Is-he-lying quiet and can’t-make-rent quiet. There’s the quiet that inspires poets, and quiet that torments the lonely.”
Source: Cat-Tales Book 1
“Keep quiet and ponder! Speak and say something!”
“It's been said that actions speak louder than words. Sometimes, it's what you don't say or do, that sends the loudest message.”
Source: The Other 99 T.Y.M.E.S: Train Your Mind to Enjoy Serenity
“With silence comes mindfulness, and thus we become better at choosing our words with kind intent before we express them.”
Source: Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life
“Tra un fiore colto e l’ altro donato
l’ inesprimibile nulla”
Source: Vita d'un uomo - Tutte le poesie
“The Silence of the Final Goodbye
I knew you best from the silences,
The time and space in between,
The moment before our lips touched,
The way your arms went up in the air before you laughed,
The smile that we shared before we talked,
The redness on your face before your tears,
The sensation of your arms around me after you released the embrace.
The look you gave me before you walked away,
Nothing had ever been so painful,
No words could say what your eyes told me,
When I wake in the morning without you,
It’s the first thing I hear…
The silence of the final goodbye.”
“Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.”
Source: The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
“I let quiet shape what I say, then realize there is nothing that can be fully said—the reason for gestures and eyes and art. Always something waiting, wanting, expectant, yet also curiously not.”
Source: Love Letters to the World
“that we die, our very humanity slayed, whenever we choose to remain silent in the face of tyranny.”
Source: Never Look an American in the Eye: A Memoir of Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American