"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"God is silent. Now if only man would shut up."
— Woody Allen

"We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence."
— Edith Sitwell

"I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with. "
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him."
— Jodi Picoult

"Silence is a source of Great Strength."
— Laozi

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact."
— George Eliot

"The silence was unbearable to him. If the pictures could have reflected the feelings inside him, they would have been screaming in pain."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
— James Joyce

"In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
— George Eliot

"Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him."
— Jodi Picoult (Keeping Faith)

"...is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude. And stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks. And nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh unto the other... And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon..."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Sometimes life seems to quiet into paralyzing silence."
— Flyleaf

"Silence is the ultimate weapon of power."
— Charles de Gaulle

"Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it."
— Jack Kerouac

"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. "
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence."
— Spanish proverb

"Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words."
— William Faulkner (Mosquitoes: A Novel)

"Learn to get intouch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in life has a purpose."
— ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS MD

"Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple."
— Julius Lester (The Autobiography of God: A Novel)

"Your very silence shows you agree."
— Euripides

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation."
— Jean Arp

"In the ultimate stillness
Light penetrates the whole realm;
In the still illumination,
There pervades pure emptiness.
When I look back on the
Phenomenal world,
Everything is just
Like a dream.
"
— Han-shan Te-Ch'ing

"The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"There is a silence that comes to a house when no one can sleep. I guess it's the price of love; I know it's not cheap."
— U2

"Writers shouldn't fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence -- it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it -- don't talk about it. And if you hate my books -- please, for God's sake, shout it from the hills! "
— Robert Fanney

"At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right"
— Miguel de Unamuno

"Silence can often be more disturbing than noise, it reveals the complicated mechanism of our thoughts"
— Jose Rodrigues Migueis

"Dream Song:

As my eyes
Search the prairie,
I feel the summer in the spring.
Whenever I pause
The noise
Of the village. "
— Frances Densmore (American Indians and Their Music)

"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides."
— Artur Schnabel

"Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence."
— Aldous Huxley (The Genius and the Goddess)

"The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence."
— Remy de Gourmont (The Angels of Perversity)

"There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling."
— Erich Segal (Love Story)

"What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?"
— Kathy Acker (My Mother: Demonology)

"We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity."
— Junta Tuitival Revolutionary Proclamation, La Paz, 7/16/1809

"The pale water which goes away along paths of silence."
— Georges Rodenbach

"It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Sometimes When we lose hope there isnt time to get it back so we sit in our sorrow but never would get out as if lock up in a dark room or corner, closing eyes wont help, ask for a piece of hope and hold it close you will soon get light in your darkness and silence, oh that pitiful place in your mind is sorrow"
— Lexi Luna (Lost Hope)

"Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves."
— Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip)