2,656 Quotes About Silence

Influence is when you don't talk and yet your words fill the room; when you are absent and yet your presence is felt everywhere.

A long time elapsed, and the parents had not mentioned the name of their dead child. They never spoke of the little girl they had lost; their sorrow would have become doubly heavy if it had been brought out into clear daylight, and its power acknowledged. Now they tried to push it away, not let it penetrate beyond thought. As long as words didn't help, why use them? Exchanged between two mourning people, they were only a dissonant sound, disturbing the bitter consolation of silence.

Sweetheart, I’m listening. To all those words you aren’t saying.

Overwhelmed by what he’d admitted, I didn’t know what to say. But he lowered his head and kissed me, and I learned that sometimes when someone says something so devastatingly perfect, there isn’t a need for a response. The words said it all.

Silence by any other name is called shame.

When you're silent, your silence condones it. Thus, whatever you believe in goes down the drain.

I want to say something comforting, but I know that this is one of the moments when words would be like an appendix—superfluous or harmful.

...from the word you build the village, but from silence you construct the world.

In reading a recent novel, I myself was convicted by a comment the mother makes to her adult daughter: ‘My dear, you’ve missed so many opportunities to say nothing.’ We do miss these opportunities, as well as opportunities to say less and say it more judiciously. And so we miss particular delights of finding words and speaking them into silences big enough to allow them to be heard.