Quotes About Quiet

“The world is quiet here.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.”
― Gayle Forman, If I Stay

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear. ”
― Baba Ram Das

“The quiet sense of something lost”
― Alfred Tennyson

“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
― Rollo May

“summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. you can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. summer just opens the door and lets you out.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content, The quiet mind is richer than a crown...”
― Robert Greene

“The statue stood quiet and still, like the silhouette of a tired mime.
”
― Jarod Kintz, At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.

“We love the night and its quiet; and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds.”
― Fitz James O'Brien, Classic Ghost Stories

“The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240)”
― Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl

“As spiritual searchers we need to become freer and freer of the attachment to our own smallness in which we get occupied with me-me-me. Pondering on large ideas or standing in front of things which remind us of a vast scale can free us from acquisitiveness and competitiveness and from our likes and dislikes. If we sit with an increasing stillness of the body, and attune our mind to the sky or to the ocean or to the myriad stars at night, or any other indicators of vastness, the mind gradually stills and the heart is filled with quiet joy. Also recalling our own experiences in which we acted generously or with compassion for the simple delight of it without expectation of any gain can give us more confidence in the existence of a deeper goodness from which we may deviate. (39)”
― Ravi Ravindra, The Wisdom of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Guide by Ravi Ravindra

“The Chair


I’m writing to you, who made the archaic wooden chair
look like a throne while you sat on it.

Amidst your absence, I choose to sit on the floor,
which is dusty as a dry Kansas day.

I am stoic as a statue of Buddha,
not wanting to bother the old wooden chair,

which has been silent now for months.
In this sunlit moment I think of you.

I can still picture you sitting there--
your forehead wrinkled like an un-ironed shirt,

the light splashed on your face,
like holy water from St. Joseph’s.

The chair, with rounded curves
like that of a full-figured woman,

seems as mellow as a monk in prayer.
The breeze blows from beyond the curtains,

as if your spirit has come back to rest.
Now a cloud passes overhead,

and I hush, waiting to hear what rests
so heavily on the chair’s lumbering mind.

Do not interrupt, even if the wind offers to carry
your raspy voice like a wispy cloud.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Letter to Andre Breton, Originally Composed on a Leaf of Lettuce With an Ink-dipped Carrot

“Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. ”
― Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial- I believe we are lost.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“I sat up, sliding them off, and the quiet around me did not, for once, seem empty and vast. Instead, for the first time in a while, it felt like it already was full.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

“But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?"
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.”
― H. Beam Piper, Fuzzies and Other People

“I am a minimalist. I like saying the most with the least.”
― Bob Newhart

“Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what's working and what's not, so that we can make changes for the better. (January 17)”
― Sarah Breathnach, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy

“Quiet is here and all in me. ("Dress of White Silk")”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.”
― Ester Buchholz

“There is nothing more harrowing than a deadly hush with the feel of a great noise around it”
― Jessie Douglas Kerruish, The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.

This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

“Q: Why do I love thee, O Night?
A: Because you know I will never answer.”
― Vera Nazarian

“How often do we talk just to fill up the quiet space? How often do we waste our breath talking about nonsense?”
― Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

“Depending on their psychic make up, for some people, closing the eyes or being quiet produces anxiety and increases mental agitation. In such situations it is better to undertake the practice of yoga–whether physical yoga or meditation–with other people with whom one is comfortable and at ease. Gradually, as we see more and more clearly their roots, the fears and the imaginings will diminish. Mental distractions are harder to overcome when practicing alone. (109)”
― Ravi Ravindra, The Wisdom of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Guide by Ravi Ravindra

“A quiet kid is a good kid. But a quiet and invisible kid is an even better kid.”
― Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

“Solitude is the house of peace.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"

“These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it.”
― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“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.”
― Margaret McMullan, Sources of Light

“Sometimes it is the quiet observer who sees the most.”
― Kathryn L. Nelson, Pemberley Manor

“Even without being believed, magic can change things. It moves invisibly through the air, dissolving the usual ways of seeing, allowing new ways to creep in, secretly, quietly, like a stray cat sliding thought the bushes.”
― Janet Taylor Lisle, Afternoon of the Elves