#silence

Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body. ↗

— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#beyond #body #cessation #dying #frightening

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#isolation #loneliness #modern-society #noise #peace

If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable. ↗

— Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

#silence #sound #age

There are in life a few moments so beautiful,that even words are a sort of profanity. ↗

— Diana Palmer

#silence #beauty

After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#silence #spirituality #beauty

I read her eyes like paragraphs and her tears like chapters for she didn't have much to say with words, but rather, silence. And never let them tell you that silence, isn't beautiful. For silence is what happens when words fall asleep and you must carry the belief that one day they will wake up inside of you. ↗

— Christopher Poindexter

#silence #words #beauty

Silence, too, can be torture. ↗

— Justina Chen

#silence #torture #beauty

She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her. ↗

— Kristin Cashore

#loneliness #silence #solitary #stars #beauty

Silence made space for other people's words, which was important for those who needed to be listened to. ↗

— Rachel Simon

#listened #listening #love #rachel-simon #silence

For a moment she lay still in the big bed, blinking sleepily, loath to move. And then she realized that the angel’s song hadn’t stopped on her waking. Silence sat up. The tantalizingly beautiful voice was coming from the half-open door to Mickey O’Connor’s room. ↗

— Elizabeth Hoyt

#scandalous-desires #silence #beauty