#silence

With a changing key, you unlock the house where the snow of what’s silenced drifts. Just like the blood that bursts from Your eye or mouth or ear, so your key changes. Changing your key changes the word That may drift with flakes. Just like the wind that rebuffs you, Clenched round your word is the snow. ↗

— Paul Celan

#silenced #snow #word #change

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time. ↗

— Martin Luther King Jr.

#change #generations #good-people #indifference #repentance

There you go again, declaring the exact inverse of your experience. You human pups are so full of the things you're sure of. Sit down and listen for a change. ↗

— J. Aleksandr Wootton

#human-experience #listening #silence #wisdom #change

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility. ↗

— Harold Pinter

#communication

The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. ↗

— Harold Pinter

#communication

No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did. ↗

— Eugenio Montale

#kafka #silence #communication

The fruit of silence is tranquillity ↗

— Arabic saying

#communication

Better to be a laughing-stock than lose the fort for fear of being one. ↗

— Rosemary Sutcliff

#courage #fear #silence #courage

Those who have witnessed executions say there is no sound worse than the weeping of mother watching her son being put to death. They're wrong. There is one sound that is worse. There is silence. ↗

— Carolee Dean

#dean #dylan-dawson #execution #silence #take-me-there

I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. ↗

— Henry Miller

#blood #eloquent #fecundity #incomprehensible #light