Life Mute Quotes & Sayings

Zakhar Georgiyevich Travkin could have stopped right there! But no! Continuing his attempt to expunge his part in this and to stand erect before his own conscience, he rose from behind his desk--he had never stood up in my presence in my former life--and reached across the quarantine line that separated us and gave me his hand, although he would never have reached out his hand to me had I remained a free man. And pressing my hand, while his whole suite stood there in mute horror, showing that warmth that may appear in an habitually severe face, he said fearlessly and precisely:
'I wish you happiness, Captain! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And
I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often
not. Life is a dream surely. — Virginia Woolf

I often think my life would be a lot easier if I were a mute. — Patricia Gaffney

The cruel part is that, to let the play live, you have to surrender control and let your characters go. You have to let them stumble, fall into walls and be mute, let them drift and be lost. If you hold the reins too tight, they won't spring to life. — Tina Howe

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere
to a higher plane, and purify yourself
by drinking as if it were ambrosia
the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness.
Free from the futile strivings and the cares
which dim existence to a realm of mist,
happy is he who wings an upward way
on mighty pinions to the fields of light;
whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise
into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked,
outreaches life and readily comprehends
the language of flowers and of all mute things. — Charles Baudelaire

Trust thou thy Love: if she be proud, is she not sweet?
Trust thou thy love: if she be mute, is she not pure?
Lay thou thy soul full in her hands, low at her feet-
Fail, Sun and Breath!-yet, for thy peace, she shall endure. — John Ruskin

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you're overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can't understand them for the life of you, even though you've tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you're the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don't have to tell me your name. You don't have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you're finding life to be the one thing that's trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back. — Henry Rollins

I lowered myself into an armchair. I was enveloped in a cloud of dust. All that remained of my life was in my lap. I sat for a time thus, as still as the mute objects that surrounded me. How little it all meant, in the end. — Sandra Gulland

What I enjoy about the live experience is getting onstage, being handed a guitar that is in tune, taking it off mute, knowing that the very moment I want to play a note, I can play it. People are waiting on me and I'm waiting on me, and I have no idea what I'm going to play. That's the biggest joy in life. — John Mayer

One of the greatest lessons we can learn in life is how to keep mute when the boiling ring of anger is dropped within us — Ikechukwu Izuakor

It was real sweet, except that he'd drugged me and ridden me to within an inch of my life, and I was still so high I was paralyzed and mute. But other than that, I guess it was pretty romantic. — Jordan Castillo Price

That's my window. This minute
So gently did I alight
From sleep--was still floating in it.
Where has my life its limit
And where begins the night?

I could fancy all things around me
Were nothing but I as yet;
Like a crystal's depth, profoundly
Mute, translucent, unlit.

I have space to spare inside me
For the stars, too: so full of room
Feels my heart; so lightly
Would it let go of him, whom

For all I know I have started
To love, it may be to hold.
Strange, as if never charted,
Stares my fortune untold.

Why is it I am bedded
Beneath this infinitude,
Fragrant like a meadow,
Hither and thither moved,

Calling out, yet fearing
Someone might hear the cry,
Destined to disappearing
Within another I. — Rainer Maria Rilke

So, what's the big emergency, princess? You and ice-boy look fine to me, and the Nevernever isn't crumbling around us. What's going on?"
"I'm pregnant, Puck," I said quietly, and watched his eyebrows shoot into his hair. Briefly,I explained what had happened at Elysium, the oracle's mysterious appearance and invitation, and Grimalkin's instruction to meet him at the Wishing Tree. By the time I was done, Puck was still staring at me openmouthed, struck mute for maybe the second time in his life, and I would've laughed if the situation wasn't so serious.
"Oh," he finally managed. "That's, uh ... Wow. That's not something you hear every day. Not exactly what I was expecting, though the entire prophecy thing does get old after a while." He shook himself, seeming to regain his composure, and glanced at Ash. "So, it's the ever so popular Firstborn Child of Doom prophecy, huh, ice-boy? How very cliche. Why can't it be the third nephew twice removed who's fated to destroy the world? — Julie Kagawa

Life is like a mute tutor: it teaches by showing what we call fate — S.E. Sever

I can't speak, can't move. The living room is hot, airless despite the open windows. I can hear noises from the street below: a police siren, young girls shouting and laughing, bass booming from a passing car. Normal life. But in here, the world is ending. For Scott, the world is ending, and I can't speak. I stand there, mute, helpless, useless. — Paula Hawkins

After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.
When passion comes late in life it is hard to bear.
One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.
I wished her goodnight, touching her hand only and thankful for the dark that hid her eyes. — Jeanette Winterson

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures. — Dalai Lama XIV

I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat. It is only some carnivorous animals that have to subsist on flesh. Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality ... Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures. — Dalai Lama

I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people's cars. I didn't care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn't know me and I didn't know anybody. I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody'd think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they'd leave me alone. — J.D. Salinger

I was assigned to the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn't been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a dirty room whose bookshelves were crammed with empty bourbon bottles and crucifixes, mute testimony to the limits of literature as a sustaining comfort in life. — Maureen Corrigan

How much I wanted to move into these rooms and live forever in this domain of medieval autumns and mute winters, serving out my sentence of life among all the visible and invisible wonders I had only dreamed about from so far away. — Thomas Ligotti

Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world. — Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel

The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it. — John Williams

The though revives in him the oldest memory of his life. A child sees a door closing: without knowing who it is that has just left, he senses it is someone he loves with all his tiny, still mute being. — Andrei Makine

Hail O mighty, fathomless sleep, come on and hug me tight and sweet;
when I whisper those deepest pains, onto your ears mute and keen,
sing for me the sweetest song that would sound the profoundest of life!
Leave me upon your rocking arms, watched by spirits of placid nights!

Goodnight, world, sweet dreams folks, blessed are those who would sleep at peace! — Preeth Nambiar

the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. It — Henry James

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough. — Jeffrey Eugenides

life would be perfect if girls had a mute button, guys had an delete button, bad times had a fast forward button, and good times had a pause button. — Julie Stone

Now we see it, lying in the middle of the road. A swan, a mute swan. It looks like an offcut of organza, crumpled around the edges, twitching. As we pass we see its long neck has buckled into its body like a folding chair. We see its wings are tucked back as if the tar is liquid and the swan is swimming.
There are two men and a woman in the road. One man is standing on the tar, the other is directing the traffic. The woman is kneeling down beside the swan. I think she is crying, she seems to be crying, and this makes me suddenly angry. I think of all the other creatures we've seen since we set out. I think of the rat, the fox, the kitten, the badger. I think of the jackdaw, did you see the jackdaw? We passed it in the queue to pass the swan. Its beak was cracked open, its brains squeeged out. Why didn't anybody stop for the jackdaw? Because the swan looks like a wedding dress, that's why. Whereas the jackdaw looks like a bin bag. Because this is how people measure life. — Sara Baume

Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying
yet in all the houses and on the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their feet to the cemetery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest. — Anton Chekhov

You have to have approached a place from all four cardinal points if you want to take it in, and what's more, you also have to have left it from all these points. Otherwise it will quite unexpectedly cross your path three or four times before you are prepared to discover it. One stage further, and you seek it out, you orient your-self by it. The same thing with houses. It is only after having crept along a series of them in search of a very specific one that you come to learn what they contain. From the arches of gates, on the frames of house doors, in letters of varying size, black, blue, yellow, red, in the shape of arrows or in the image of boots or freshly-ironed laundry or a word stoop or a stairway's solid landing, the life leaps out at you, combative, determined, mute. You have to have traveled the streets by streetcar to realize how this running battle con-tinues up along the various stories and finally reaches its decisive pitch on the roofs. — Walter Benjamin

We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act. — Jean-Paul Sartre

[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. — Audre Lorde

I have shown you this evening autographic records of the history of stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings! So similar in fact that you cannot tell one apart from the other. Among such phenomena, how can we draw a line of demarcation and say, here the physical ends and there the physiological begins? Such absolute barriers do not exist.
It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self made records, and perceived in them one phase of a pervading unity that bears within it all things - the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon our earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us - it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago: "They who see but one, in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth - unto none else, unto none else! — Jagadis Chandra Bose

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. 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.
Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under. — Khaled Hosseini

It was nice to feel something other than anxiety, or mute fury, the twin emotions that seemed to make up so much of my daily life. — Jojo Moyes

The Handsome Prince Handbook is mute on the subject of chronic workaholism - Prince Charming, apparently, knew how to delegate - and I didn't know where else to turn for help. What do you do when life begins to go wrong and you've used up all three wishes? — Nancy Atherton

Small sands the mountain, moments make the year, And trifles, life. - Young. The smallest hair throws its shadow. - Goethe. He that despiseth small things shall fall little by little. - Ecclesiastes. It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. - Tennyson. "A pebble in the streamlet scant Has turned the course of many a river: A dewdrop on the baby plant Has warped the giant oak forever. — Orison Swett Marden

Even though I seem not human, a mute shelf

of glucose, bottled blood, machinery

to swell the lung and pump the heart - even so,

do not put out my life. Let me still glow. — Dudley Randall

If you look at another
woman, I'll rip your eyes out. Touch one and I'll cut off your hands. Kiss
her and I'll sever your tongue from your mouth.
"You don't want to know what I'll do if I find out your dick got
anywhere near another woman. So the choice is yours, you can live life as a
blind, mute eunuch with stubs at the end of your arms or you can close the
club... — Jenny Penn

Silence is a mirror. So faithful, and yet so unexpected, is the relection it can throw back at men that they will go to almost any length to avoid seeing themselves in it, and if ever its duplicating surface is temporarily wiped clean of modern life's ubiquitous hubbub, they will hasten to fog it over with such desperate personal noise devices as polite conversation, hummin, whistling, imaginary dialogue, schizophrenic babble, or, should it come to that, the clandestine cannonry of their own farting. Only in sleep is silence tolerated, and even there, most dreams have soundtracks. Since meditation is a deliberate descent into deep internal hush, a mute stare into the ultimate looking glass, it is regarded with suspicion by the nattering masses; with hostility by buisness interests (people sitting in silent serenity are seldom consuming goods); and with spite by a clergy whose windy authority it is seen to undermine and whose bombastic livelihood it is perceived to threaten. — Tom Robbins

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.
And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all. — Boris Pasternak

What an incredible thing! How much less they had than other human beings. Mentally retarded, deaf, mute - and still eagerly sanding benches. — Daniel Keyes

We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. — Annie Dillard

Mute the venomous self-talk in your mind. Eliminate the poisonous theory of, "Same Crap, Different Day." Today is a new day - make it count! — Steve Maraboli

Losing myself interests me. The fertile topsoil interests me, sprawling beneath a light dusting of snow, and the snow that crams the trunks and branches of the pines and elms and redwoods, having frozen up their roots, subdues me to consider life and death. What lurks beneath the ground? Surely dead seeds and frozen worms reside deep below that earth, and surely all those presentiments of life lying dormant, dead or dying, scattered and mute, like memories. — S.K. Kalsi

We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear. — John French

All my work will explode inside my body, each fragment of my anatomy will acquire a life of its own, outside mine, Humberto won't exist, only these monsters, the despot who imprisoned me at La Rinconada to force me to invent him, Ines's honey complexion, Brigida's death, Iris Mateluna's hysterical pregnancy, the saintly girl who was never beatified, Humberto Penaloza's father pointing out Don Jeronimo dressed up to go to the Jockey Club, and your benign, kind hand, Mother Benita, that does not and will not let go of mine, and your attention fixed on these words of a mute, and your rosaries, the Casa's La Rinconada as it once was, as it is now, as it was afterwards, the escape, the crime, all of it alive in my brain, Peta Ponce's prism refracting and confusing everything and creating simultaneous and contradictory planes, everything without ever reaching paper, because I always hear voices and laughter enveloping and tying me up. — Jose Donoso

Silence
THERE is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave - under the deep, deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush'd - no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox or wild hyaena calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan -
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. — Thomas Hood

A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life's moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here. — Michael Puttonen

Most people who bother to think about plants at all tend to regard them as the mute, immobile furniture of our world - useful enough, and generally attractive, but obviously second-class citizens in the republic of life on Earth. — Stefano Mancuso

Poetry and song lyrics might want us to believe that finding love is like uncovering buried treasure, but now I know the truth. There's no joy or celebration in love. There are no happy endings. There is simply me and her and a crushing pain. What's left after that? An entire life of mute should-haves and second-bests. — Autumn Doughton

I'm made mute by the virtue of decision
And I choose most of your life goes on without me
Oh the fear I've known
That I might reap the praise of strangers and end up on my own
All I've sown was a song
But maybe I was wrong — Emily Saliers

Music is my voice, which illuminates my soul. To deny me this inspiration, is to mute my contemplations on life. — Patricia H. Graham

A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute. — Tobsha Learner

Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope. — Anne Tyler

The real power of silence is to keep silent. The real power of silence is in the works of silence! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Out of the starless night that covers me,
(O tribulation of the wind that rolls!)
Black as the cloud of some tremendous spell,
The susurration of the sighing sea
Sounds like the sobbing whisper of two souls
That tremble in a passion of farewell.
To the desires that trebled life in me,
(O melancholy of the wind that rolls!)
The dreams that seemed the future to foretell,
The hopes that mounted herward like the sea,
To all the sweet things sent on happy souls,
I cannot choose but bid a mute farewell.
And to the girl who was so much to me
(O lamentation of this wind that rolls!)
Since I may not the life of her compel,
Out of the night, beside the sounding sea,
Full of the love that might have blent our souls,
A sad, a last, a long, supreme farewell. — William Ernest Henley

I have three phobias which, could I mute them,would make my life as slick as a sonnet,but dull as ditch water:I hate to go to bed,I hate to get up and I hate to be alone ... — Tallulah Bankhead

It will surprise you. It will keep you mute. it will make you ponder. It will ignite your passion. It will dumb fold you. It will invoke your joy. It will kick your pain away. It will shake your envy. It will shove your slothfulness.It will wake you up. It will turn your thought. It will inspire you. It will give you reasons. It will harness your potentials. It trigger your power.It will grease your body. It will electrify your nerves. It will make you giggle. It will shake your body. It will make you inquire and enquire.It will leave you in wonder. That is it! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

If I stand alone, It does not mean, I am any less a Human, If my arms do not hold another, It does not mean, They are incapable of holding, If my tongue is silent, And never speaks the words of Love, It does not mean, That it will be mute, When the time comes, That the words can sincerely be spoken. And just because the World, Has not yet introduced, The one that will share my Life, It certainly does not mean, That I am incapable, Of Loving. — Javan