In The Silence Of The Night Quotes & Sayings

Jason felt all the blood drain out of his face. He stood there as the reality of Mitch's words hit him hard. One day it would be another man Haley would talk to, watch games with, or just sit in absolute peaceful silence while they worked or ate, and worst of all it would be another man holding Haley in his arms at night.
'Fuck ... ,' he gasped.
'Oh great, you broke him! Are you happy now?' Brad demanded. 'Come on, buddy, we'll get you fixed up with a cold beer and a plate of hot wings. How does that sound? Does that sound good?' Numbly, Jason nodded. — R.L. Mathewson

You told me trees could speak
and the only reason one heard
silence in the forest
was that they had all been born knowing different languages.

That night I went into the forest
to bury dictionaries under roots,
so many books in so many tongues
as to insure speech.

and now this very moment,
the forest seems alive
with whispers and murmurs and rumblings of sound
wind-rushed into my ears.

I do not speak any language
that crosses the silence around me
but how soothing to know
that the yearning and grasping embodied
in trees' convoluted and startling shapes
is finally being fulfilled
in their wind shouts to each other.

Yet we who both speak English
and have since we were born
are moving ever farther apart
even as branch tips touch. — Carol Goodman

Balance is key. In everything you do. Dance all night long and practice yoga the next day. Drink wine but don't forget your green juice. Eat chocolate when your heart wants it and kale salad when your body needs it. Wear high heels on Saturday and walk barefoot on Sunday. Go shopping at the mall and then sit down and meditate in your bedroom. Live high and low. Move and stay still. Embrace all sides of who you are and live your authentic truth! Be brave and bold and spontaneous and loud and let that complement your abilities to find silence and patience and modesty and peace. Aim for balance. Make your own rules and don't let anybody tell you how to live according to theirs. — Rachel Brathen

She opened her mouth wide in a silent scream and his release caught him, hard and fast as he kissed her openmouthed. He tore his mouth from hers and shouted his triumph. She was his, now and forevermore, until the end of time, until the seas ran dry and man no longer roamed the earth, amen.
His and only his.
She slumped against him, the scent of their passion musky in the night air.
"Sleep," he murmured to her, and held her against himself, his cock still buried deep.
She was caught and he had no intention of ever letting her go. — Elizabeth Hoyt

the suit, if there is one, we still lose because of the publicity." I was scarcely hearing a word of it. Horrible images were playing crazily inside my mind. The 911 call, the fact it was aborted, made me see it. I knew what happened. Lori Petersen was exhausted after her ER shift, and her husband had told her he would be in later than usual that night. So she went to bed, perhaps planning to sleep just awhile, until he got home - as I used to do when I was a resident and waiting for Tony to come home from the law library at Georgetown. She woke up at the sound of someone inside the house, perhaps the quiet sound of this person's footsteps coming down the hallway toward the bedroom. Confused, she called out the name of her husband. No one answered. In that instant of dark silence that must have seemed an — Patricia Cornwell

From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again. — Albert Camus

We left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. the night was muggy, and all around me i felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. whenever i thought of time in puerto rico, i was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes
and if i watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three for four notches would startle me when it came. — Hunter S. Thompson

So seek beauty, Miss Prim. Seek it in silence, in tranquillity; seek it in the middle of the night and at dawn. Pause to close doors while you seek it, and don't be surprised if it doesn't reside in museums or in palaces. Don't be surprised if, in the end, you find beauty to be not in Something but Someone. — Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

I waited. Nothing. Here again was the colossal silence where God's, someone's, anyone's voice should have been. Learn this lesson now, my brother said, I shan't teach it twice. There is nothing. It means nothing. Then the night exhaled and flowed again. I knew with clairvoyant weariness I'd go back countless times to the question of why, how, but knew too I carried the answer inside. It had gone in like an inhaled spec of toxic dust. Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be. — Glen Duncan

I hope you sleep better than I do." The change in topics threw me. "You're not sleeping?" He slowly shook his head. "Knowing my bedroom backs up to yours, that you're only a wall away, lying in bed, makes that pretty fucking impossible." Every muscle in my body loosened, tingles of energy rushing through me. Could a girl orgasm from words? A charged silence passed between us. "'Night. — Rebecca Yarros

Horse

What does the horse give you
That I cannot give you?

I watch you when you are alone,
When you ride into the field behind the dairy,
Your hands buried in the mare's
Dark mane.

Then I know what lies behind your silence:
Scorn, hatred of me, of marriage. Still,
You want me to touch you; you cry out
As brides cry, but when I look at you I see
There are no children in your body.
Then what is there?

Nothing, I think. Only haste
To die before I die.

In a dream, I watched you ride the horse
Over the dry fields and then
Dismount: you two walked together;
In the dark, you had no shadows.
But I felt them coming toward me
Since at night they go anywhere,
They are their own masters.

Look at me. You think I don't understand?
What is the animal
If not passage out of this life? — Louise Gluck

The stars drew light across the night sky in that little mountain village, and the silence and the cold made the darkness vanish away. It was - I don't know how to explain it - as if everything solid melted away into the ether, eliminating all individualtiy and absorbing us, rigid, into the immense darkness. Not a single cloud to lend perspective to the space blocked any portion of the starry sky. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." — Nicole Krauss

She died."
I had to prompt him.
"Soon after?"
"In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital."
"Poor girl."
"All past. All under the sea."
"You make it seem present."
"I do not wish to make you sad."
"The scent of lilac."
"Old man's sentiment. Forgive me."
There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.
"Is this why you never married?"
"The dead live."
The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.
"How do they live?"
And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.
"By love. — John Fowles

Every spring
I hear the thrush singing
in the glowing woods
he is only passing through.
His voice is deep,
then he lifts it until it seems
to fall from the sky.
I am thrilled.
I am grateful.
Then, by the end of morning,
he's gone, nothing but silence
out of the tree
where he rested for a night.
And this I find acceptable.
Not enough is a poor life.
But too much is, well, too much.
Imagine Verdi or Mahler
every day, all day.
It would exhaust anyone. — Mary Oliver

When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and saw that in containing Him she contained the world besides. The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and end of all things came before her in her deepest heart. And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm she slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence." -Thomas Merton — Thomas Merton

In the silence that followed, violent anger hit Blay from out of
nowhere.
Now his hands shook for a different reason.
"So," Saxton said hoarsely. "How was your night?"
"What the hell happened down there?"
Saxton loosened his tie. Unbuttoned his collar. Took yet another
deep breath. "Family tiff, as it were."
"Bullsh*t."
Saxton shifted exhausted eyes over. "Must we do this?"
"What happened - "
"I think you and Qhuinn need to talk. And once you do, I won't have to worry about being jumped like a felon again."
Blay frowned. "He and I have nothing to say to each other - "
"With all due respect, the ligature marks around my neck would
suggest otherwise."
-Lover at Last, pg. 188 of the galleys — J.R. Ward

For the past several years, I have gone to sleep every night in this same little pocket, the most uneventful piece of time I could find. Same exact thing every night, night after night. Total silence. Absolutely nothing. That's why I chose it. I know for a fact nothing bad can happen to me in here. — Charles Yu

I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of our bed, we tried every position and every angle. I explored the curves on her body and delighted in seeing the freedom of her ecstasy. Her desperate whispers and pleas. I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me too. We lay in bed with our limbs entangled, in a pacific silence that reminded me of existing on a beach just for the sake of such an existence. I couldn't imagine the world ever becoming better, and for some strange reason the thought slipped into my head that I had suddenly grown to be an old man because I could only hope to repeat, but never improve on, a night like this. I finally took her home sometime when the interstate was empty, and the bridges seemed to lead to nowhere, for they were desolate too. — Sergio Troncoso

I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with other I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts.
When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carreid the promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that.
But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning. — Karl Ove Knausgard

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend. — Claudia Rankine

In the morning, celebrate the beauty and warmth of sun light,
in the evening, celebrate the song of silence and love of night. — Debasish Mridha

First things first, my silence last night had nothing to do with you, but also had everything to do with you. You were not good last night, Lily, and I'm not the kind of guy that's filled with sweet words." Shaking his head, he adds, "That's not me."
I'm trying to undertand where this is going so I simply nod.
He nods, too. "But I get you. And I know that nothing I said last night would've helped. So I shut my trap, knowing that whatever I could've said would've only made things worse. That wasn't something we needed. So, rather than using words, I showed you how I could take care of you. So now you know. We can go from there." His face softens as he says, "You didn't ruin anything, baby. Got to taste you in every way, take care of you, and hold you all night. That's not bad."
Shaking his head slowly, he utters, "That's fucking phenomenal. — Belle Aurora

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. that it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty. — David Hume

What would you think about us doing the ceremony together?"

"The Crying Pools ceremony?" Kami asked. "The one Lillian said was dangerous?"

"Yeah," Ash said. "I mean, we both know it's a big decision. But it's something to think over. It might make all the difference to the town. Look, do you want to come in?" He stepped a little aside. The night air was pulling frost-tipped fingers through Kami's hair, but she stayed where she was.

"Did Jared say that? That it was a big decision?"

"And we both needed to think it through," Ash said.

"Think it through?" Kami repeated, above the sound of the wind. "Jared? Don't you know him at all? If he sounds reasonable, or sensible, or capable of any sort of rational thought, it means he's lying through his teeth! What did you tell him about the ceremony?"

They stared at each other for a moment of horrified silence. "I told him how to do it," — Sarah Rees Brennan

Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage - of Will Ladislaw's grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now - the delicate woman's face which yet had a headstrong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature! She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it. Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage. — George Eliot

You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly - I could seize them with my hands - out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Now I know without a shadow of doubt that you can't chase away those images, let alone the visible holes that burrow deep down inside. You can't chase away the reverberations or the memories that stir as night falls or in the early hours. You can't chase away echoing screams, still less echoing silence — Delphine De Vigan

She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth. — Albert Camus

You can listen to the secrets of life
in the silence of night,
in the voice of the ocean,
in the beating of your heart.
Just listen with your soul. — Debasish Mridha

Before the Battle:
Music of whispering trees
Hushed by the broad-winged breeze
Where shaken water gleams;
And evening radiance falling
With reedy bird-notes calling.
O bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams.
I have no need to pray
That fear may pass away;
I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight
That summons me from cool
Silence of marsh and pool,
And yellow lilies islanded in light.
O river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night. — Siegfried Sassoon

In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again. — Glen Cook

Then without any warning the car stopped. They were there.
"The ride's over," someone said. "End of the ride."
For a moment nobody got out. They just sat there. The driver cut the ignition, and after that there was silence. Complete, uncanny silence, more frightening than the most threatening noise or violence could have been. Night silence. A silence that had death in it. ("The Number's Up") — Cornell Woolrich

All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. ("Where The Woodbine Twineth") — Davis Grubb

And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber. — James Agee

At an early age I found myself facing the incomprehensible, the unthinkable, death. Ever since, I have known nothing on this earth can be shared because we own nothing. There is a word inside us stronger than all others - and more personal. A word of solitude and certainty, so buried in its night that it is barely audible to itself. A word of refusal, but also of absolute commitment, forging its bonds of silence in the emfathomable silence of the bond.
This word cannot be shared. Only sacrificed. — Edmond Jabes

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said. — Marge Piercy

Yes indeed! My desires were fulfilled beyond measure. My lover and I emerged from the Bedouin tent a little before sunrise. Finding a quiet spot, we sat in silence, witnessing the morning sun rise above the mountain of Moses, while our host slept peacefully, after an exhausting night of love. — Young

In his play depicting the Salem Witch Trials, the author illustrates profound psychological bullying. The ringleader of young girls suspected of unsavory conduct, frightens her friends into silence by warning: Now, look you; All of you. We danced. And Tituba conjured Ruth Putnam's dead sisters, and that was all ... Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night, and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. — Arthur Miller

I felt sad because I knew I couldn't hold the ocean's beauty for long enough, nor the sun and the salty wind; and yet, I was happy because I knew I took part of the ocean with me, and the remembrance of the ages with the salt impregnated onto my skin. This is how I felt as the sun was setting, dipping into the ocean, slowly moaning in silence, as the salt and wind eclipsed it, and silence broke free with the night's veil of shadows. — P.A. Wunderlich

He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy's breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood. — Flannery O'Connor

If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it.
I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil
and its head bent low with patience.
The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish,
and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky.
Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests,
and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves. — Rabindranath Tagore

In the dead of night, his keen senses suddenly focused on the entry door. An infinitesimal sound of metal pierced the silence in the hallway. Immediately, Sharko turned off the light and grabbed up his Sig. Here they were. Beneath his door, he saw, very briefly, the beam of a flashlight, before everything went black again. His jaw set, he slowly got up from his chair and crept toward the living room. On the other side, the linoleum floor creaked slightly. Sharko felt the edge of his sofa and crouched down, his gun aimed blindly in front of him. He could have attacked from the front, by surprise, but he didn't know how many there were. One thing was for sure: they rarely went out alone. — Franck Thilliez

In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave - it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine - his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Beverly had thought how strange and wonderful it would be if the earth were hurled far from its orbit, into the cold extremes of black space where the sun was a faint cool disc, not even a quarter-moon, and night was everlasting. Imagine the industry, she thought, as every tree, every piece of coal, and every scrap of wood were burned for heat and light. Though the sea would freeze, men would go out in the darkness and pierce it's glassy ice to find the stilled fish. But finally all the animals would be eaten and their hides and wool stitched and woven, all the coal would be burned, and not a tree would be left standing. Silence would rule the earth, for the wind would stop and the sea would be heavy glass. People would die quietly, buried in their furs and down. — Mark Helprin

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary.
I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle. — Charlotte Bronte

They lay there like that, in a different kind of silence now, watching the lake and the stars, listening to the night, each basking in the warmth of the other. — Kimberly Derting

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. — Ben Okri

Midnight
The hours glide
Like drops of water on a window pane
Midnight silence
Fear unrolls in the air
And the wind
hides at the bottom of the well
OH
It's a leaf
We think the earth is going to end
Time
stirs in the shadow
Everyone is asleep
A SIGH
Inside the house someone has just died — Vicente Huidobro

The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites. — D.H. Lawrence

Anyone who has learned the Quran and holds it lovingly in his heart will 'value his nights when people are asleep, his days when people are given to excess, his grief when people are joyful, his weeping when people laugh, his silence when people chatter and his humility when people are arrogant'. In other words every moment of life will be precious to him, and he should therefore be 'gentle', never harsh nor quarrelsome, 'nor one who makes a clamour in the market nor one who is quick to anger'. — Ibn Mas'ud

Now I find my good men
Are gathered in the night
To wait in silence, not to sleep
And the glorious word of liberty
They whisper and murmur
Till in unaccustomed strangeness
On the steps of our temper
Once again in delight they cry
Freedom! Freedom! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Silence had entered me.
It was like the night, and my memories - they were like stars
in that they were fixed, though of course
if one would see they are unending fires, like the fires of hell. — Louise Gluck

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

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

They met in the library searching for old Sidney Sheldon books. Her silence and calmness drew her to him. His brooding nature drew him to her. Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire!

There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library...

And being an obsessive man, he did things normal men did not! Like he knew the number of strands of hair that her eye-lashes had! — Avijeet Das

In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else. — Jhumpa Lahiri

(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them
the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind
should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not. — Jerome K. Jerome

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer - committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. — George Eliot

Listen for somebody trying to talk to you ...
(Silence)
This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian
Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself? — Iain M. Banks

What did I fear, and why? - I, to whom the night had been
a more familiar face
than that of man
I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm! — Ambrose Bierce

In the stillness of the night I have walked in your streets, and my spirit has entered your houses,
And your heart-beats were in my heart, and your breath was upon my face, and I knew you all.
Aye, I knew your joy and your pain, and in your sleep your dreams were my dreams.
And oftentimes I was among you a lake among the mountains.
I mirrored the summits in you and the bending slopes, and even the passing flocks of your thoughts and your desires.
And to my silence came the laughter of your children in streams, and the longing of your youths in rivers. — Kahlil Gibran

There was an unearthly quality to the way he sang that melody that night - as if he were winging through unknown worlds in search of sources of strength beyond himself. His eyes were open, fixed, but gazing inward. There was a sweetness and sadness, a sense of pain and yearning in his voice - soft, tremulous, climbing and falling and climbing again. And when he was done there was a long silence - and in that silence I thought I heard distant cries, and I was afraid. — Chaim Potok

But from morning to night Anne was with the king, as close to his side as a newly wed bride, as a chief counselor, as a best friend. She would return to our chamber only to change her gown or lie on the bed and snatch a rest while he was at Mass, or when he wanted to ride out with his gentlemen. Then she would lie in silence, like one who has dropped dead of exhaustion. Her gaze would be blank on the canopy of the bed, her eyes wide open, seeing nothing. She would breathe slowly and steadily as if she were sick. She would not speak at all. When she was in this state I learned to leave her alone. She had to find some way to rest from the unending public performance. She had to be unstoppably charming, not just to the king but to everyone who might glance in her direction. One moment of looking less than radiant and a rumor storm would swirl around the court and engulf her, and engulf us all with her. When — Philippa Gregory

Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Time changes its nature in prisons and hospitals. In this cosmogony it both races and drags itself. For anyone who hasn't been a long-term patient or prisoner - or both, like Sharmila - there is no way to imagine what evenings are like when you are locked in - the indeterminate hour when the sun has gone down but night hasn't fully set in. It haunts you. In a hospital, especially one where air-conditioning and double-glass windows don't shield you from the real world, there are mixed sounds that rise up from every floor; murmurs, shallow breaths, the sounds of pain and healing. Once the final inspections are done and the trays and bowls carried away, a shroud of silence falls over everything. It can be strangely tranquil, or eerily desolate. — Anubha Bhonsle

LIFE IN ALEXANDRA was exhilarating and precarious. Its atmosphere was alive, its spirit adventurous, its people resourceful. Although the township did boast some handsome buildings, it could fairly be described as a slum, living testimony to the neglect of the authorities. The roads were unpaved and dirty, and filled with hungry, undernourished children scampering around half-naked. The air was thick with the smoke from coal fires in tin braziers and stoves. A single water tap served several houses. Pools of stinking, stagnant water full of maggots collected by the side of the road. Alexandra was known as "Dark City" for its complete absence of electricity. Walking home at night was perilous, for there were no lights, the silence pierced by yells, laughter, and occasional gunfire. So different from the darkness of the Transkei, which seemed to envelop one in a welcome embrace. — Nelson Mandela

Some people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by typewriter or word processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and the revise; others can't write the second paragraph until they have fiddled endlessly with the first.

But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. — William Zinsser

The silence of a convent at night is the silence of the grave. Too far removed from the busy world without for external sounds to penetrate the thick walls, whilst within no slamming door, nor wandering foot, nor sacrilegious voice breaks in upon the stillness, the slightest noise strikes upon the ear with a fearful distinctness. ("The Monk's Story") — Catherine Crowe

THE INNER HISTORY OF A DAY No one knew the name of this day; Born quietly from deepest night, It hid its face in light, Demanded nothing for itself, Opened out to offer each of us A field of brightness that traveled ahead, Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps And the light of thought to show the way. The mind of the day draws no attention; It dwells within the silence with elegance — John O'Donohue

But he hadn't appeared that night. Not the next morning, either. By the time she finally crossed paths with him the following afternoon, his mumbled "Merry Christmas" was the extent of their exchange.
It seemed they were back to silence.
I don't want you.
She tried to ignore the words echoing in her memory. They weren't true, she told herself. She was an expert at deceit; she knew a lie when she heard one.
Still. What else to believe, when he avoided her thus?
Although he rarely spoke to her over the next two days, Sophia frequently overheard him speaking of her. Even these remarks were the tersest of commands: "Fetch Miss Turner more water," or "See that her canopy doesn't go slack." She felt herself being tended, not unlike a goat. Fed, watered, sheltered. Perhaps she shouldn't complain. Food, water, and shelter were all welcome things.
But Sophia was not livestock, and she had other, more profound needs. Needs he seemed intent on neglecting, the infuriating man. — Tessa Dare

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life. — M. Ageyev

Every Princess has one Prince to share the loves and joys of life, and do you know how that Princess knows which Prince is hers?"
"How Mommy?"
"From the kiss."
"But how?"
"The very first kiss with your Prince will change your life. When your lips touch for the first time, the earth will feel like it stops moving, but in the same moment, the world around you spins. It'll feel like fireworks in the night sky. Like a bright light in the darkness. You'll feel your heart beat fast in your ears but silence will surround you. And when you pull apart and open your eyes and look at each other, and really see each other. You'll know it in that moment, through that kiss, that you've just let someone own a piece of your heart, and you'll live happily ever after. — Jay McLean

Out of the new arrivals in our lives
the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child
we constantly make of ourselves our selves. — Nancy Mairs

The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams encased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night. — Cormac McCarthy

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude. — George MacDonald

Come, drink the mystic wine of Night, Brimming with silence and the stars; While earth, bathed in this holy light, Is seen without its scars. — Louis Untermeyer

The original reality of Amitabha is our own Dharma body, It shines out brightly everywhere, in the South, North, East, and West, It is like the autumn moon that lies in the high, vast sky, In the silence of the night its brilliance shines far over the ocean. — Thich Nhat Hanh

If you want to do his soul good, why do you continually obstruct him? It hardly makes him a better man. Do you never think that, if you had bowed to the king's wishes years ago, if you had entered a convent and allowed him to remarry, he would never have broken with Rome? There would have been no need. Sufficient doubt was cast upon your marriage for you to retire with a good grace. You would have been honoured by all. But now the titles you cling to are empty. Henry was a good son of Rome. You drove him to this extremity. You, not he, split Christendom. And I expect that you know that, and that you think about it in the silence of the night. — Hilary Mantel

My eyes have never seen the moon so lovely as tonight;
In silence wrapped, it is the breathless music of the night. — Galaktion Tabidze

That night for the first time in my life I realized that it is the physical presence of people and their spirits that gives a town life. With the absence of so many people, the town became scary., the night darker, and the silence unbearably agitating. Normally, the crickets and the birds sang in the evening before the sun went down. But this time they didn't, and the darkness set in very fast. The mood wasn't in the sky; the air was stiff, as if nature itself was afraid of what was happening. — Ishmael Beah

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past ... and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. — Tea Obreht

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife. — Nikki Gemmell

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night. — Eugene Ionesco

[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

This frequently happened. Dantes, cast from solitude into the world, frequently experienced an imperious desire for solitude; and what solitude is more complete, or more poetical, than that of a ship floating in isolation on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity, and under the eye of heaven? — Alexandre Dumas

He drove the car back through the night to Paris. The hedges and orchards of Normandy flew past him. The moon hung oval and large in the misty sky. The ship was forgotten. Only the landscape remained. The landscape, the smell of hay and ripe apples, the silence and the deep peace of the inevitable — Erich Maria Remarque

And then more quiet, silence so deep it almost drowned out the roar of the night music that pounded away in my secret self. — Jeff Lindsay

Deity of the ruined temple! The broken strings of Vina sing no more your praise. The bells in the evening proclaim not your time of worship. The air is still and silent about you.
In your desolate dwelling comes the vagrant spring breeze. It brings the tidings of flowers
the flowers that for your worship are offered no more.
Your worshipper of old wanders ever longing for favour still refused. In the eventide, when fires and shadows mingle with the gloom of dust, he wearily comes back to the ruined temple with hunger in his heart.
Many a festival day comes to you in silence, deity of the ruined temple. Many a night of worship goes away with lamp unlit.
Many new images are built by masters of cunning art and carried to the holy stream of oblivion when their time is come.
Only the deity of the ruined temple remains unworshipped in deathless neglect. — Rabindranath Tagore

You're not going to believe this. I can barely believe it." "Go on." I licked my lips. "I met someone." Her squeal was so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. "And?" "And I had three orgasms last night." Silence. "Coco?" "I'm sorry, I was in shock. Did you say three?" I smiled. "Yes." "Who is this wizard of O's?" "His — Melanie Harlow

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren't confrontations with God but with the difficulty
in my own mind, or in the human lot
of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed
into what, I had no idea. — Wendell Berry

It seems that there is never to be any perfect rest. Even in Eden the snake rears its head among the laden boughs of the Tree of Knowledge. The silence of the dreamless night is broken by the roar of the avalanche; the hissing of sudden floods; the clanging of the engine bell marking its sweep through a sleeping American town; the clanking of distant paddles over the sea ... — Bram Stoker

Wordlessly they settled on a third-story ledge near Patriarch's Pond, of the roof across from Luce's window, where they used to watch her sleep. The memory would be fresher in Daniil's mind, but the faint recollection of Luce lying dreaming under the covers still sent a warm rush across Daniel's wings.
Both were somber.In the bombed-out city, it was sad and ironic that her building had been spared when she hadn't. They stood in silence in the cold night,both carefully tucking back their wings so that they wouldn't accidentially touch. — Lauren Kate

Wives of criminals, Massau later reflected, were indeed an interesting lot. There are those who, real panthers in madness, defend their men with claws out; there are the cold and insensitive ones, who wrestling step by step, discuss each argument and answer your questions with other questions; there are the stubborn ones who can pass the entire night in total silence against the light of the interrogation; there are still others, who, shaken and in distress, discover as you do that they have lived for years beside a monster. — David King

Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night. — John Burroughs

Words had failed us that night, and I'd welcomed the silence. Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the rest of my days."--Abigail Whimble, Return to the Outer Banks House — Diann Ducharme

I know that the day will come when my sight of this earth shall be lost, and life will take its leave in silence, drawing the last curtain over my eyes.
Yet stars will watch at night, and morning rise as before, and hours heave like sea waves casting up pleasures and pains.
When I think of this end of my moments, the barrier of the moments breaks and I see by the light of death thy world with its careless treasures. Rare is its lowliest seat, rare is its meanest of lives.
Things that I longed for in vain and things that I got
let them pass. Let me but truly possess the things that I ever spurned and overlooked. — Rabindranath Tagore