“All I wanted - all I’d ever wanted - was just to get away. To be somewhere small where I could crowd in and feel safe, all four walls pressed around me, no one staring or pointing or yelling.”
Source: Just Listen
“The dark was still a mystery, something hidden, something to be scared of, but I'd come to fear the light, too. It was where everything was revealed, or seemed to be.”
Source: Just Listen
“Eyes closed, I saw only the blackness, reminding me of this one thing, the most deep of my secrets; eyes open, there was only the world that didn't know it, bright, inescapable, and somehow, still there.”
Source: Just Listen
“You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”
“[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.”
Source: David Copperfield
“Good stories are not confrontative—they are collaborative. A story is collaboration. My words become your pictures.”
Source: Business Storytelling from Hype to Hack: How Do Stories Work? Unlock the Software of the Mind
“C'est un parleur étrange, et qui trouve toujours
L'art de ne vous rien dire avec de grands discours.”
Source: The Misanthrope
“After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, 'God, Madam'.”
Source: G.K. Chesterton: A Biography
“I prose on with a facility that wearies you to death.”
Source: The Letters of Madame De Sevigne to Her Daughter and Friends
“As a teenager and young adult, I found being mute intensely isolating and dehumanizing. I felt truly like I was just a pair of eyes and ears - an entity without a body, without a face, and without a mouth. I felt as though I was barely a physical being.”
Source: Selective Mutism In Our Own Words: Experiences in Childhood and Adulthood