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Voices Quotes

Browse 96 quotes about Voices.

Voices Quotes

“I've always seen hidden meanings in everything. Whenever I used to do those puzzles in children's magazines, the ones where you're supposed to find all the hidden pictures, I'd never find the right ones. I'd say I found the griffin, and the Wesselman steam engine, and the missing little finger of the mummy of Tut, and everyone would give me a strange look and say, All you're looking for is a yellow duck. […] work up to the voices of places you can only imagine. Ask where to find the griffin, and the Wesselman steam engine, and the little finger of Tut. I know they're out there, and usually in the strangest of places. And if you find the yellow duck, let me know. That's the one I always miss.”

“Let us also acknowledge that the hearts which suffer the most from our wars are those of mothers. Their vital voices have been left out of the political equation for too long. An Iraqi or American mother cries the same as an Israeli or Afghan mother. The eyes of a mother who has suffered the loss of a child can destroy the soul of anyone who gazes upon them. More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies. War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.”

“It took years and years for the chorus of voices demanding an inquiry into the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada to be successful. We heard for years that one of the factors leading to the demise of these women was the assumption that they lived high-risk lifestyles such as working in the sex trade. This was a common reason for rejecting pleas for an inquiry. Even if this were true, does it justify a failure to protect them or properly investigate their deaths?”

“It is my prayer that we would stop for a moment, turn off the voices that clamor for our allegiance, put aside the incessant rant of political agendas, and sit with ourselves for just a moment. And in the quiet of that moment, listen to your heart. For what you will hear is not all that far removed from the people that the ‘voices’ and ‘agendas’ claim to be your enemies.”

“What do you see, Galahad?" He shivered again, and said, "I beg you, do not call me by that name, cousin." She laughed, "So, even though you live among Christians you have the old belief of the Faerie Folk, that one who knows your true name can command your spirit if you will. You know my name cousin, what would you have me call you? Lance, then?" "What you will, save for the name my mother gave me. I still fear her voice when she speaks that name in a certain tone. I seem to have drunk in that fear from her breasts.”

“The pitfalls of wokeism become evident in its tendency to silence voices that deviate from the accepted narrative, stifling the dynamic interplay of ideas essential for societal progress. The cancellation of individuals, especially in the realm of comedy, illustrates a broader pattern of suppressing dissent. A healthy society embraces humor as a powerful form of expression, understanding that the essence of comedy often lies in challenging norms and offering alternative perspectives. To protect free speech, it is imperative to resist the impulse to cancel voices that contribute to the mosaic of diverse opinions, even when delivered through the lens of satire.”

“Sounds" Few are the sounds that deepen and enrich silence .. There are sounds without which silence remains incomplete, like a ticking clock or the sudden sound of a cycling fridge… The chirping roaches and cicadas, or croaking frogs… Then there are those sounds that make existence more alienating and unbearable, like the scuffle of a big insect against a window or a door as if committing suicide! Or a creaking rusty door we close behind a departing loved one, knowing deep inside that they won’t return and nothing would be the same after closing that door.. The whistling sound of a kettle declaring that peace and tranquility are illusions that never last… There are also those sounds that summarize the traumas of the past from which hearers never recover, like the screams and cries of the woman next door when beaten by her husband… The coughing, spitting, and heavy breathing of an elderly woman we visited in our childhood… And can we ever forget the sounding sirens of the ships and trains declaring that departure is inevitable? [Original poem published in Arabic on September 15, 2023 at ahewar.org]”

“Breaking our silence is powerful. Whether it comes as a whisper or a squeak at first, allow that sense of spaciousness, of opening, allow yourself to trust the bottomlessness, and lean into the dark roar which will light up every cell. Though it may start softly, we build in confidence and skills, we realise we do not need to wait for permission before we open our mouths. We do not need to wait for others to make space for us, we can take it. We do not need to read from others’ scripts or style ourselves in weak comparison. We do not need to look to another’s authority because we have our own. Down in our cores. We have waited so long for permission to know that it was our time, our turn on stage. That time is now. Our voices are being heard into being. They are needed.”

“There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.”

“Most of us will find love; we shall also encounter opponents, rivals, and outright enemies, an evil nemesis worthy of unqualified hatred. Occasionally we act as the antagonist on our own casting card. Our own internal voice(s) can torture us with feelings of insanity. For example, before filling her overcoat pockets with stones and drowning herself in a river, English writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) left a final note to her husband disclosing, ‘I feel certain that I am going mad again.’ Her last note also stated that she feared that she would not recover from her illness, she could not endure another depressive episode, and she was hearing voices.”

“The chemistry between their voices—his vulnerability, her fragility—it grabs you and doesn’t let you go. With his voice deep and smooth, and her voice higher and raspier, they somehow still meld together effortlessly, like two voices that have been singing together for ages. They created a deeply heartfelt call and response—a story of this romantic and idealized future that may never come to pass.”

“Then all the winds of Heaven ran to join hands and bend a shoulder, to bring down to me the sound of a noble hymn that was heavy with the perfume of Time That Has Gone. The glittering multitudes were singing most mightily, and my heart was in blood to hear a Voice that I knew. The Men of the Valley were marching again. My Fathers were singing up there. Loud, triumphant, the anthem rose, and I knew, in some deep place within, that in the royal music was a prayer to lift up my spirit, to be of good cheer, to keep the faith, that Death was only an end to the things that are made of clay, and to fight, without heed of wounds, all that brings death to the Spirit, with Glory to the Eternal Father, forever, Amen.”

“Perry was leaning into my mother as he listened to what she said. They talked so close. He only leaned closer, his hands on the table, his leg touching hers. "It's so risky," my mother said. "Why are you doing this?" "Because I'm human being. Because we're all human beings." My mother closed her eyes and winced. Maybe her hearing aid was ringing and bothering her, but as I watched her turn down the volume, I wanted to tell her right then that she couldn't quiet all those outside voices forever.”

“It was what the gleeman had called Plain Chant, those nights beside the fire on the ride north. Stories, he said, were told in three voices, High Chant, Plain Chant, and Common, which meant simply telling it the way you might tell your neighbor about your crop. Thom told stories in Common, but he did not bother to hide his contempt for the voice.”