Quotes about silence

This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.

So little is said about the scholarship boy in pages and pages of educational literature. Nothing is said of the silence that comes to separate the boy from his parents.

You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own.

He is the child of his silence.

To live in silence is to live like the whales.

"When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing." (p.275)

The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women's words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence' sometimes men react to women's words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.

It is easier not to speak a word at all than to speak more words than we should.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.

“Don’t press her,” said Cooper. “If someone decides to leave something unsaid, my experience is that everyone is happier if they don’t insist on his saying it.”

What difference does it make, whether we keep our silence because [they] force us or because we're afraid they might force us?