Silence Is Wrong Quotes & Sayings

Why do silences mean something different when we're with different people? With you, it's never awkward, is it? It's just silence. But with other people, I feel the need to fill it with inane ramblings. What's wrong with silence? — Holly Martin

Whereas Beckett gives us silence, Roth gives us noise; whereas Beckett gives us the last hope of comradeship, Roth gives us the self-loathing promiscuity of the solitary offender; whereas Beckett gives us waiting, Roth gives us hyperactivity. In a world without God, we have to make the most of our doubt, and we can best do that by committing blasphemy, sleeping with our friends' wives, giving offense. Because nobody knows anything, we can never know when we are right; we can never know, therefore, what is good. Only by being in the wrong can we know anything of ourselves, and that is the most intense way to be. — Anonymous

Pushing through some viney branches, she comes into a clearing andfinds a sight that makes her hush
and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts ...
It's something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene
as though what she's looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent in the wrong way like those baby legs. — Alden Bell

Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one. — Robin Hobb

Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. — Virginia Woolf

It is the final sign of imbecility in a people that it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon - and is very particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem straining to keep things in rather than to let things out. — G.K. Chesterton

It's me, you fool. Who do you think it is? I'm coming in."
He was already naked. She turned away from him as he slipped in by her side but he caught her in his arms and felt her body thaw his belly and thighs. That was all, just to lie there listening to the breathing and the silence and feel the warmth colour his belly and thighs and head. She never wore clothes in bed. They were naked and the warmth run out of her. He wanted to laugh, because it was such a marvelous discovery to make, this warmth. She was hissing like a snake.
"No, it's wrong." She went on hissing.
She brought an elbow back smartly and struck him in the paunch. She seemed all elbows, shoulder blades and heels. It was like trying to make love to a dough-mixing machine. She wanted it, didn't she, otherwise why all this hissing and moaning? — P.H. Newby

Cease ceasing movement so abruptly! Christ, woman, must you catapult forward after each cessation? Are you certain you've strapped the mirror securely? We should stop and check it. By Danu, wench, try nudging this beast gently, not kicking it with both heels! A silence, a slew of choked curses, then: Horses! What the bloody hell is wrong with horses? Have they all been slain in battle? — Karen Marie Moning

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

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

The Hatter was the first to break the silence. "What day of the month is it?" he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear. Alice considered a little, and then said "The fourth." "Two days wrong!" sighed the Hatter. — Lewis Carroll

Love is a funny thing," he says, breaking the silence.
"Sometimes, I'd like to be better with words, so that I could talk about it more. It seems so wrong to me that there is this condition that affects all of us, more than anything else in our lives ever will, and only the poets and song writers get to talk about it with any sort of authority. — Rowan Coleman

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal - and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math. — Lionel Shriver

The situation got worse when they came back to her apartment after and someone put on music. An advert interrupted during a moment when I was the person nearest the laptop, and so somebody said to me - quite threateningly, I felt - Put something else on. Obviously I forgot every song I have ever heard in my entire life. In one swift tug, like the tablecloth trick where everything is supposed to remain on the table gone wrong, every name of every artist disappeared too. The only keywords I could think of were the ones on a toy keyboard-and-tape-recorder combo I'd been given as a child, and I hadn't known their meaning even then. Bossa nova, for example.

I said I couldn't think of anything, any music, except silence, and retreated to the corner of the room, pretending to busy myself by scouring the bookcase there, which held little gatherings of figurines as well as Mizuko's many books. — Olivia Sudjic

Saul said, "I have been wrong in my thoughts and deeds. But God in his great mercy has given me light. Light through blindness. I now stand here to proclaim that Jesus is the Messiah, the risen Lord, the Son of God. He is come to save man from his sins. He is the gateway to heaven! Accept him as your Savior, and receive God's forgiving grace!" After a stunned silence, a clamor of voices filled the air. Had this man just said what they thought they heard? The murderer, Saul of Tarsus, proclaiming Jesus Christ as the Messiah? — Davis Bunn

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside
be glad for me. — Franz Wright

Holiness is the strength of the soul. It comes by faith and through obedience to God's laws and ordinances. God then purifies the heart by faith, and the heart becomes purged from that which is profane and unworthy. When holiness is achieved by conforming to God's will, one knows intuitively that which is wrong and that which is right before the Lord. Holiness speaks when there is silence, encouraging that which is good or reproving that which is wrong. — James E. Faust

The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence. — Elie Wiesel

Karrin smiled faintly and shook her head. "He always said you knew ghosts. You're sure it was really him?"
Mort eyed her. "Me and everyone else, yeah."
Karrin scowled and stared into the middle distance.
Mort frowned and then his expression softened. "You didn't want it to be his ghost. Did you?"
Murphy shook her head slowly, but said nothing.
"You needed everyone to be wrong about it. Because if it really was his ghost," Mort said, "it means that he really is dead."
Murphy's face ... just crumpled. Her eyes overflowed and she bowed her head. Her body shook in silence. — Jim Butcher

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. — George Orwell

Negotiation exposes something at once simple and intricate about intimacy: that it is far better to actually know your partner's body by becoming one with their interior selves, and you can only do this by talking to them. Far from being the stereotypical "mood killer," sexual knowing requires discussion, requires asking questions, a lesson that I and so many others have had to learn quite painfully; the worst sexual experiences of my own life occurred, as I often say, because I did not know how to ask and did not know how to tell. For too long I thought sex had to occur in a kind of monastic, knowing silence. To do anything else would be to risk giving offence, putting myself in harm's way, or simply ruining the atmosphere; how wrong I was. — Katherine Cross

Tact is the rare ability to keep silent while two friends are arguing, and you know both of them are wrong. — Hugh Allen

Silence tells the seeker in us to love, to love himself. It tells us it is wrong to hate ourselves because of our imperfections. When the seeker loves himself, loves the Divine within himself, he eventually realises the Ultimate Truth. — Sri Chinmoy

And then they started deleting the protest reviews.
That was my line. When they started to stamp out dissent, actually to make it disappear with virtually no excuse for doing so ... that's not neglect. That's not an overwhelmed person or people trying to figure it out. That's an entity that has decided that they do not care, that they have moved on from the issue, do not see it as an issue, and is trying to avoid bad press. Or they are too far down the line to backtrack on what they've been doing and save face. They're content with their wildly inconsistent policy enough to no longer care what effect it is having on their user base.
If you try to silence dissent, then something is very, very wrong. — G.R. Reader

Just do your duty in silence. When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind. Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move. What — Margaret Atwood

I did everything wrong," he said. "I misunderstood everything. Moon Child gave me so much, and all I did with it was harm, harm to myself and harm to Fantastica."
Dame Eyola gave him a long look.
No," she said. "I don't believe so. You went the way of wishes, and that is never straight. You went the long way around, but that was your way. And do you know why? Because you are one of those who can't go back until they have found the fountain from which springs the Water of Life. And that's the most secret place in Fantastica. There's no simple way of getting there."
After a short silence she added: "But every way that leads there is the right one. — Michael Ende

We become equally responsible for the actions of others the instant we become conscious of what they are doing wrong but remain silent because we think it is right. — Suzy Kassem

Information is like water. It finds its way to all the wrong places. — Dexter Hawk

In moments of high emotion, whether they're triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment, if the next thing you are going to say makes you feel better, than it's probably the wrong thing to say. — Amor Towles

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: "There's a pedophile!" Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done.'
'What had she done?' I ask.
'Shoplifting,' says Tam.
There is silence. — Jon Ronson

Follow your heart and take a chance that you'll be wrong. Take a chance that maybe you'll fuck it all up and everyone will say you're crazy. What's the worst that can happen? Face that fear and accept it. Because to silence your heart and forget your dreams is to die while living. LIVE. Don't let the world scare you into being something you're not. Get out there and risk the unusual or you'll have to settle for the ordinary. So, no-one else has done it before? There is no road map for you to follow? Then, you be the first! Pave the way for someone else. Find your courage and follow your heart.
Be brave, wild one, be brave. — Brooke Hampton

The senses get tired. Sometimes, long before the end, they say, I'm quitting - I'm getting out of this now. And then the person is less prepared to meet the world, and stays at home more, without some of what he needs if he is to go on.

If it all quits on him, he is really alone; in the dark, in the silence, numb hands, nothing in his mouth, nothing in his nostrils. He asks himself, Did I treat them wrong? Didn't I show them a good time? — Lydia Davis

Silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much. The Hatter was the first to break the silence. 'What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear. Alice considered a little, and then said 'The fourth.' 'Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. 'I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare. 'It was the best butter, — Lewis Carroll

Like all the girls back then I knew that being too clever was much worse than being too tall. Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads of the fairy tale before I knew it. In any case, you could cultivate the wrong sort of silence - the sort that implied brooding self-absorption rather than attentiveness. — Lorna Sage

That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.
'Not quite right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; some of the words have got altered.'
'It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes. — Lewis Carroll

Silence. At this point, I expected Corey to say something like, "Jen? I don't know. Jen who?" or "Jen? I have a cousin named Jen, I think, who goes to Georgia Tech," or "Jen? Like Jen Aniston?" or something that basically shows he has no clue what I'm talking about. But silence is not good. Silence is almost as good as saying, "Oh, Jen. She's just one of those tanned strumpets you've been imagining that I'm out clubbing with every night. Only she's not imaginary after all. The only part you got wrong was her name. — Lauren Barnholdt

So tell us," says Connor, "in The World According to Hayden, when do we start to live?"
A long silence from Hayden, and then he says quietly, uneasily, "I don't know."
Emby razzes him. "That's not an answer."
But Connor reaches out and grabs Emby's arm, to shut him up- because Emby's wrong. Even though Connor can't see Hayden's face, he can hear the truth of it in his voice. There was no hint of evasion in Hayden's words. This was raw honesty, void of Hayden's usual flip attitude. It was perhaps the first truly honest thing Connor had ever heard him say. "Yes, it is an answer," Connor says. "Maybe it's the best answer of all. If more people could admit they really don't know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War. — Neal Shusterman

To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Not even the ones holding betting slips, the ones who are usually beyond caring. Possibly because they know me from the Hob, or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, who no one could help loving. So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong. — Suzanne Collins

As Israel prepares to enter, my position is well known. It is one that I have taken at previous Olympics. It is wrong that the IOC refuses to have a minute's silence for Israeli athletes that were slaughtered in Munich. — Brian Williams

Meditation isn't just something we do to make ourselves more peaceful and to take some of the stress out of our lives. We do it because it's the only direct experience we can have of knowing God. Because God is that which is indivisible. Everything else in the universe, in the physical world, is divisible. Up and down, good and bad, right and wrong, male and female, and so on. But that which is indivisible in our physical experience is called silence. And when you get into silence, you're coming to know the indivisibleness of your life - and that's conscious contact. — Wayne Dyer

No one is calling any of these designers racist. The act itself is racist. There were more black models working in the Seventies than there are in 2013. This a time when silence is not acceptable at all. If the conversation cannot be had publicly in our industry, then there is something inherently wrong. — Iman Abdulmajid