White Silence Quotes & Sayings

I'm an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by the very thoughts of silence. I'm a gray green fallow leaf on trees and abandoned on the streets, a never-ending spring season and an eternal autumn. I'm the golden of the sun and the silver of the moon, the fog of dawn and the amber of dusk. I'm the white and the red flag , the obedient and the rebel. I am the coward in the brave, and the child in the man. I am, but a writer. — Nema Al-Araby

And perhaps one day, in after years, someone would wander there and listen to the silence, as she had done, and catch the whisper of the dreams that she had dreamt there, in midsummer, under the hot sun and the white sky. — Daphne Du Maurier

Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity, - the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heavens artillery, - but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggots life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear od death, of God, of the universe, comes over him, - the hope of the Resurrection and the life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.
- The White Silence — Jack London

An infant knows its body, but not the body-based distinctions. It is just conscious and happy. After
all, that was the purpose for which it was born. The pleasure to be is the simplest form of self-love, which later grows into love of the self. Be like an infant with nothing standing between the body and the self. The constant noise of the psychic life is absent. In deep silence the self contemplates the body. It is like the white paper on which nothing is written yet. Be like that infant, instead of trying to be this or that, be happy to be. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore. — Henry Miller

Within the caves of deepest longing
Echoes the sounds of majestic eve!
Upon the sphere of bright white skies
Spreads the paint of evening colours!
Silence divine, Penetrates deep
Onto the void of ethereal joy!
All I have is a bundle of letters
That would sound nothing definite!
Hold my arms to touch my warmth,
O dear, whisper on my ears soft,
Is silence the fall of words or
Are words the wreck of silence? — Preeth Nambiar

But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica. — Jenny Diski

Letter 17


Morning. The snow was falling outside. There was a white silence.
My mother and I sat facing my father at the dining room table.

There was something impenetrable about his gaze. It was like pack ice.

And the ice was thickening.

I could barely see into him.

I knew.
And they knew that I knew.

He was broken.

I did not even need to look at him.

I could feel his brokenness all thorough the room. — Gregory Colbert

And the voice spoke even more deliberately: ' ... but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.'
And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind's eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Red like blood White like bone Red like solitude White like silence Red like the beastly instinct White like a god's heart Red like thawing hatred White like a frozen, pained cry Red like the night's hungry shadows Like a sigh piercing the moon it shines white and shatters red — Tite Kubo

Sometimes I thought of Him as a cloud in the sky; ... sometimes as simply an enormous white light. Whatever the image, I would imagine Him close to me. And then I would wait, listening to my breath, until the silence came. And I would mutter: I give myself to You. — Ayad Akhtar

As for Nina, Genya had offered up a glorious red kefta from her collection and they'd pulled out the embroidery, altering it from blue to black. She and Genya were hardly the same size, but they'd managed to let out the seams and sew in a few extra panels.
It had felt strange to wear a proper kefta after so long. The one Nina had worn at the House of the White Rose had been a costume, cheap finery meant to impress their clientele. This was the real thing, worn by soldiers of the Second Army, made of raw silk dyed in a red only a Fabrikator could create. Did she even have a right to wear such a thing now?
When Matthias had seen her, he'd frozen in the doorway of the suite, his blue eyes shocked. They'd stood there in silence until he'd finally said, "You look very beautiful."
"You mean I look like the enemy."
"Both of those things have always been true."
Then he'd simply offered her his arm. — Leigh Bardugo

There were dozens of pictures similar to the one I had found in the Brooklyn Museum; the same forest, the same moon, the same silence. The moon was always full in these works, and it was always the same: small, perfectly round circle in the middle of the canvas, glowing with the palest white light. After I had looked at five or six of them, they gradually began to separate themselves from their surrounds, and I was no long able to see them as moons. They became holes in the canvas, apertures of whiteness looking out onto another work. Blakelock's eye, perhaps. A blank circle suspended in space, gazing down at things that were no longer there. — Paul Auster

Click.
The salamander flared, etching the room with searing white light and dark shadows.
Otto screamed. He fell to the floor, clutching at his throat. He sprang to his feet, goggle-eyed and gasping, and staggered, knock-kneed and wobbly-legged, the length of the room and back again. He sank down behind a desk , scattering paperwork with a wildly flailing hand.
"Aarghaarghaaaargh ... "
There was a shocked silence.
Otto stood up, adjusted his cravat, and dusted himself off. Only then did he look up at the row of shocked faces.
"Vel?" he said sternly. "Vat are you all looking at? It is just a normal reaction, zat is all. I am vorking on it. Light in all its forms is mine passion. Light is my canvas, shadows are my brush."
But strong light hurts you!" said Sacharissa. "It hurts vampires!"
"Yes. It iss a bit of a bugger, but zere you go. — Terry Pratchett

It's a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or hair curling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window ... Bach, my scrawls and waste paper - silence - you could scream - there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place. — Frederic Chopin

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her - her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love. — Mary Oliver

Oft in the silence of the night,
When the lonely moon rides high,
When wintry winds are whistling,
And we hear the owl's shrill cry,
In the quiet, dusky chamber,
By the flickering firelight,
Rising up between two sleepers,
Comes a spirit all in white. — Louisa May Alcott

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds. Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder — James Joyce

Race is the great taboo in our society. We are afraid to talk about it. White folks fear their unspoken views will be deemed racist. People of color are filled with sorrow and rage at unrighted wrongs. Drowning in silence, we are brothers and sisters drowning each other. Once we decide to transform ourselves from fearful caterpillars into courageous butterflies, we will be able to bridge the racial gulf and move forward together towards a bright and colorful future. — Eva Paterson

Quiet is here and all in me. ("Dress of White Silk") — Richard Matheson

Ahead of the tin was all craning white heads and expectant muttering, behind it was silence and crumbs. Lynne — Belinda Bauer

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

When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence. — Minor White

Reading private correspondence is in poor taste, Lord Ackerly."
"Unless it is terribly interesting," Eleanor says, "which Jessamin's letters are not. Mine, however, are lurid tales of my near-death experience and subsequent sequestering against my will in the home of the mysterious and brooding Lord Ackerly. I fear I may have given you a tragic past and a deadly secret or two."
"Are we staying in a decaying Gothic abbey?" I ask.
"Naturally. When I'm finished, there won't be a person in all the city who isn't writhing with jealousy over the heart-pounding drama of my life." She pauses, tapping her pen thoughtfully against her chin. "I don't suppose you have a cousin? I could very much use a romantic foil."
Finn shakes his head. "Sorry to disappoint."
"Alas. As long as I'm not the friend who meets a tragic end that brings you two together forever through shared grief." Her line meets dead silence, and a sly grin splits her face. "Oh wait, I nearly was. — Kiersten White

It's not until we get into the car that I notice he has blood on his hand. "You've cut yourself," I say. He doesn't reply; his knuckles are white on the steering wheel. "Tom, I needed to talk to you," I say. I'm trying to be conciliatory, trying to be grown-up about this, but I suppose it's a little late for that. "I'm sorry about hassling you, but for God's sake! You just cut me off. You - " "It's OK," he says, his voice soft. "I'm not . . . I'm pissed off about something else. It's not you." He turns his head and tries to smile at me, but fails. "Problems with the ex," he says. "You know how it is." "What happened to your hand?" I ask him. "Problems with the ex," he says again, and there's a nasty edge to his voice. We drive the rest of the way to Corly Wood in silence. — Paula Hawkins

He told me how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. "And I guarantee you, I've had it in every one of them before they ever got on the payroll." A pause. Silence above humming tires on the hot-top road. "What do you think of that?" "Surely some refuse," I suggested cautiously. "Not if they want to eat - or feed their kids," he snorted. "If they don't put out, they don't get the job. — John Howard Griffin

In Texas there's so much space words have a way
Of getting lost in the silence before they're spoken
So people hang on a long time to what they have to say;
And when they say it the silence is not broken,
But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them
Over to miles of white-gold plains and grey-green hills,
And they are part of that silence that outlives them. — May Sarton

I want to marry you, Malda - because I love you - because you are young and strong and beautiful - because you are wild and sweet and - fragrant, and - elusive, like the wild flowers you love. Because you are so truly an artist in your special way, seeing beauty and giving it to others. I love you because of all of this, because you are rational and highminded and capable of friendship - and in spite of your cooking!"
"But - how do you want to live?"
"As we did here - at first," he said. "There was peace, exquisite silence. There was beauty - nothing but beauty. There were the clean wood odors and flowers and fragrances and sweet wild wind. And there was you - your fair self, always delicately dressed, with white firm fingers sure of touch in delicate true work. I loved you then. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white;
And reigns the winter's pregnant silence still;
No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill,
And willow stems grow daily red and bright.
These are days when ancients held a rite
Of expiation for the old year's ill,
And prayer to purify the new year's will. — Helen Hunt Jackson

Oh, yes," said Lord Peter. He watched the cool fingers, fascinated, and the steady approach of the needle. "Yes - I've had it before - and, d'you know - I don't care frightfully about it." He had brought up his right hand, and it closed over the surgeon's wrist like a vise. The silence was like a shock. The blue eyes did not waver; they burned down steadily upon the heavy white lids below them. Then these slowly lifted; the grey eyes met the blue - coldly, steadily - and held them. When — Dorothy L. Sayers

It was snowing. In the lamplight, blades of ice were growing on the outside of the blue-tinged window-panes and the hoarfroast, like melted sugar, glittered on the gold-spangled bottle-glass of the windows. Absolute silence enveloped the little house as it slumbered in the shadows.
Des Esseintes let his mind wander ... Like some great hanging of reverse ermine, the sky rose before him, black and dappled with white. An icy wind gusted, intensifying the wild scudding of the snow, inverting the proportions of black and white. The heraldic hanging of the sky turned itself over, becoming true white ermine, itself dappled with black by the tiny patches of night strewn among the snowflakes. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic. — Adrienne Rich

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, - then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion. — Kahlil Gibran

The mist covered the ground like the white veil over a new bride's face. The air was thick with smoke - smelling of death and decay. The birds were no longer singing their sweet songs, nor were there any immediate signs of life in the area. The charred ground crunched under my feet and I realized it was the only sound I could hear in the eerie silence. I looked up at the once milky moon and cringed at its new bright crimson color. What could've possibly caused the moon to turn blood red? I thought to myself as I continued to walk cautiously through the unrecognizable forest. — Christine Gabriel

Justice Denied
Thousands of women, probably more
I cannot reach them behind justice doors
Many stay silent, barred just like me.
Haunted by demons, faces unseen.
Still by the hundreds, they continue to serve
Duty and country, active and reserve.
Thankless, forgotten through America's wars
Scarred like their brethren, treated as foes.
Volunteered to go to the shores.
Died like the others, shamed to the core.
Where is the dignity, long since denied?
Lost in the White House of Justice Denied
Women in service since beginning of time
Often they're treated like victims in crime.
Where is their voice, silence throughout the years?
It's dead in the Senate and House, with their tears! — Diane Chamberlain

A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon light; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky.
The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. — Albert Memmi

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. — William S. Burroughs

Jesus Christ ... he was not Omega's son. Was he?
"No." V said. "You are not. He just wants to believe you are. And he wants you to think you are. But that doesn't make it true."
There was a long silence. Then Rhage's hand landed on Butch's shoulder. "Besides, you don't look a thing like him. I mean ... hello? You are this beefy Irish white boy. He's like ... bus exhaust or some shit."
Butch glanced over at Hollywood. "You're sick, you know that?"
"Yeah, but you love me, right? Come on, I know you feel me. — J.R. Ward

It was no mean trick doing the wiring with those mittens on. But I managed it and crawled out, batting spiders into the shadows. I could hear a thud as they hit the floor joists, then a scuttling sound, then, worst of all, the silence of spiders. — Bailey White

Winter invites white; white invites silence; silence invites peace. You see, there is so much peace in walking on the snow! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter. — Shauna Niequist

Well,' he said, 'we think you probably do.' When I imagine this scene as part of a movie, the minute of silence after my father says this is extended for an hour or so, and then the credits roll. — John Darnielle

The Marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City."
Old Bailey nodded, sagely: "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. "It was OK," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another. — Neil Gaiman

back in the middle ages
they burned unruly women at the stake
and out of the ashes of their bones and flesh
rose the Enlightenment and Reason fresh
and the white men declared
there's no such thing as witches
they're just crazy psycho-bitches
but we certainly can't let them run free
lock 'em up and throw away the key
yeah they said: lock 'em up and throw away the key

cause there's nothing scarier than a woman mad and/or
aware of her own magic
tragic how much violence is done
in the name of science
to ensure our silence

in Victorian times they located suffering in our uterus
in the blood in the soft internal organs
took our pain our righteous rage
they called it 'hysteria'
and then Dr. Freud ignored women's horror stories
herstories of abuse and rape and
took a justified hatred of the penis and called it
envy (he sold more books that way) — Leah Harris

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page. — Terry Tempest Williams

I know there is a moment when sound slips down the torn lining of itself into silence, is carried unheard and secret in its own pocket. But the crimson birds could find no such escape, no means of slipping beyond themselves between the cracks of color and song to a white undiscovered silence. — Janet Frame

They captured in their ramble all the mysteries and magics of a March evening. Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white, brooding silence
a silence which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds which you could hear if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears. The girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset. — L.M. Montgomery

In her white dress she was like a cold light coming into the room. Stoner started involuntarily toward her and felt Finch's hand on his arm, restraining him. Edith was pale, but she gave him a small smile. Then she was beside him, and they were walking together. A stranger with a round collar stood before them; he was short and fat and he had a vague face. He was mumbling words and looking at a white book in his hands. William heard himself responding to silences. He felt Edith trembling beside him.
Then there was a long silence, and another murmur, and the sound of laughter. Someone said, Kiss the bride! — John Edward Williams

The trip itself was the usual...adulation from all sides, rose petals strewn in my path everywhere I went, silver bells festooning the howdah on my private white elephant...you know the drill. I maintained my customary demeanor or regal calm and enigmatic silence throughout. — Charlotte MacLeod

And they three passed over the white sands, between the rocks, silent as the shadows. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone. — William Gibson

With my naked eye, on nights the moon climbs slowly, sometimes so dusted with rust and rose, brown, and gold tones that it nearly drips earth colors and seems intimately braided with Earth, it feels close, part of this world, a friend. But through the telescope, the moon seems- ironically- farther away ... the gray-white moon in a sea of black, its surface in crisp relief, brighter than ever before. I am struck too, by the scene's absolute silence. — Paul Bogard

When there is this simple, clear watching and listening, then there is an awareness - awareness of the colour of those flowers, red, yellow, white, of the spring leaves, the stems, so tender, so delicate, awareness of the heavens, the earth and those people who are passing by. They have been chattering along that long road, never looking at the trees, at the flowers, at the skies and the marvellous hills. They are not even aware of what is going on around them. They talk a great deal about the environment, how we must protect nature and so on, but it seems they are not aware of the beauty and the silence of the hills and the dignity of a marvellous old tree. They are not even aware of their own thoughts, their own reactions, nor are they aware of the way they walk, of their clothes. It does not mean that they are to be selfcentred in their watching, in their awareness, but just be aware. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Spring water is pure in an emerald stream
moonlight is white on Cold Mountain
silence thoughts and the spirit becomes clear
focus on emptiness and the world grows still — Han-shan

The eternal silence of the great white desert. Cloudy columns of snow drift advancing from the south, pale yellow wraiths, heralding the coming storm, blotting out one by one the sharp-cut lines of the land. — Robert Falcon Scott

As Bell stood in silence, watching the judges turn their backs to him and begin to walk away, he suddenly heard a familiar voice. "How do you do, Mr. Bell?" Surprised, he turned to find Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, his full, white beard neatly trimmed, his deep-set eyes bright with curiosity, looking directly at him. A passionate promoter of the sciences, Dom Pedro had asked to accompany the judges on their rounds that morning, perfectly happy to be in the tropical-like heat that reminded him of home. When he saw Bell standing in the crowd of some fifty judges and a handful of hovering inventors, he immediately recognized him as the talented teacher of the deaf whom he had met in Boston. — Candice Millard

Gather Me


Scatter me into the digression of this noise
For, I hear not when my eyes are at peace.
I smother the audacity in my voice
Hiding behind a half-charred fleece;
Let me dwell with the fleeting score,
For, I breathe not when my heart is agog!
I strangle the remains of what you tore
Building the ruins of a deserted synagogue;
Then, gather me
From the compositions of a faded song,
From the reverberations of an unaided gong;
From the mirth of our spring sky,
From the waters where thirsts lie;
From the sleekness of white-rose petals,
From the shrieks of remorse bells;
From the digression of laughter beats,
From the silence of bloodied streets;
From the eyes of their precarious silence,
From there; thence, from there; thence,
Then, gather me. — Ashfaq Saraf

Leave a silence alone, no matter how awkward it felt. Invariably the other person filled it, often with something unexpected. — Kate White

To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it. — Vladimir Nabokov

You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there
the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed. — Frederick Buechner

People. And the brutal things we do to one another.
The fence shakes against my cheek and I turn, careful to keep my gaze lifted. I don't have it in me to look at her again. Bishop is grasping the chain-link with both hands, knuckles white, his eyes closed. His whole body is wound tight as a spring, like if I reached for him he would simply break apart at the joints, splinter into a hundred pi8eces. I don't try to touch him.
He lets out a yell and then another and another, loud and wild and out of control. He shakes the fence hard with both hands. His anger and frustration are more potent somehow because they are unexpected. When his scream fades into silence, he rests his forehead against the metal. "Sometimes," he says, voice raw, "I hate this place." He twists his neck and looks at me, hands still hooked in the fence above his head.
"I know," I say, barely a whisper. "Me, too. — Amy Engel

There the black horse stood - his feet planted firm on the ground, afraid to move. His coat was covered in sweat and a stark white rim lined his eyes. All three of us gawked at his sudden silence. The rattling metal gate was now the only sound. — Brittney Joy

You lean back against the door with bowed head making ready to set out. By the time you open your eyes your feet have disappeared and the skirt of your great coat come to rest on the surface of the snow. The dark scene seems lit from below. You see yourself at the last outset leaning against the door with closed eyes waiting for the word from you to go. To be gone.Then the snowlit scene. You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see yourself there as described making ready to strike out and away across the expanse of light. You hear again the click of the door pulled gently to and the silence before the steps can start. Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placantae. — Samuel Beckett

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.
There is my desert. — Edmond Jabes

I was 9 years old when I had my first glimpse of wholeness. It was early Christmas morning and I was standing in my pajamas in the living room and looked out of the large windows. Outside the white snow flakes silently singled down toward a snowclad landscape. Suddenly I was filled with a feeling of being one with the slowly dancing snowflakes, one with the silent landscape.
I did not understand then that this was my first taste of meditation, but it created a deep thirst and a longing in my heart to return to this natural and effortless experience of being one with the Whole. — Swami Dhyan Giten

The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair. — Angelina Grimke

My first sight of the fabled warrior was a surprise. He was not a mighty-thewed giant, like Ajax. His body was not broad and powerful, as Odysseos'. He seemed small, almost boyish, his bare arms and legs slim and virtually hairless. His chin was shaved clean, and the ringlets of his long black hair were tied up in a silver chain. He wore a splendid white silk tunic, bordered with a purple key design, cinched at the waist with a belt of interlocking gold crescents ... His face was the greatest shock. Ugly, almost to the point of being grotesque. Narrow beady eyes, lips curled in a perpetual snarl, a sharp hook of a nose, skin pocked and cratered ... A small ugly boy born to be a king ... A young man possessed with fire to silence the laughter, to stifle the taunting. His slim arms and legs were iron-hard, knotted with muscle. His dark eyes were absolutely humourless. There was no doubt in my mind that he could outfight Odysseos or even powerful Ajax on sheer willpower alone. — Ben Bova

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Books; what a jolly company they are,
Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,
Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green
And every kind of colour. Which will you read?
Come on; O do read something; they're so wise.
I tell you all the wisdom of the world
Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet
You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,
And listen to the silence. — Siegfried Sassoon

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. — R.D. Laing

It's like they want to shut rappers down. They want to silence us. The Supreme Court says it's OK for a white man to burn a cross in public. But nobody wants a black man to write a record about a cop killer. — Ice-T

Antiseptic wash. He dosed himself with chlorodyne, took his own pulse, smoked a thermometer, and lay back on the couch with a suppressed groan. It was mid-afternoon, and he had completed his third round that day. He called the house-boy. "Take um big fella look along Jessie," he commanded. The boy carried the long telescope out on the veranda, and searched the sea. "One fella schooner long way little bit," he announced. "One fella Jessie." The white man gave a little gasp of delight. "You make um Jessie, five sticks tobacco along you," he said. There was silence for a time, during which he waited — Jack London

We were at the White House a couple of weeks ago," the man says, "they had a state dinner for Prince Charles and Camilla. Listen, those royals are just the finest people, no pretensions to them whatsoever. You can talk to Prince Charles about anything."
Billy nods. There's a silence. Just in time he asks, "What did you talk about?"
"Hunting," the man answers. — Ben Fountain

He dressed quickly in silence, refusing her tissues. He shakily pulled a wad of uncounted notes from his wallet, abandoned them in the no man's land between, and escaped in an indecent haste, leaving the shameful tableau in his wake. — Darren White

When an innocent man is kidnapped from his home by bearded Arab gunmen and locked indefinitely in a room he is a "hostage." But when an innocent man is kidnapped from his home by uniformed white gunmen and locked indefinitely in a room he is a "terrorist." The world causes uproar over the former but is silent over the latter. "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends," observed Martin Luther King. — Babar Ahmad

The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here. Yet she stepped out all the same. — George R R Martin

[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

And at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost and, like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window. [Lily — Virginia Woolf

When God's children pass under the shadow of the cross of Calvary, they know that through that shadow lies their passage to the great white throne. For them Gethsemane is as paradise. God fills it with sacred presences; its solemn silence is broken by the music of tender promises, its awful darkness softened and brightened by the sunlight of Heavenly faces and the music of angel wings. — Frederic Farrar

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white. — James Russell Lowell

Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Joseph Lister?" Liam said suddenly, cutting through the silence. "Really? Him?"
Chubs stiffened beside me. "That man was a hero. He pioneered research on the origins of infections and sterilization."
Liam stared hard at the faux leather cover of just Chubs's skip-tracer ID, carefully choosing his next words. "You couldn't have chosen something cooler? Someone who is maybe not an old dead white guy?"
"His work led to the reduction of post operative infections and safer surgical practices," Chubs insisted. "Who would you have picked? Captain America?"
"Steve Rogers is a perfectly legit name." Liam pass the ID back to him. " This is all ... very Boba Fett of you. I'm not sure what to say, Chubsie. — Alexandra Bracken

Racial tensions are rife with pride - the pride of white supremacy, the pride of black power, the pride of intellectual analysis, the pride of anti-intellectual scorn, the pride of loud verbal attack, and the pride of despising silence, the pride that feels secure, and the pride that masks fear. Where pride holds sway, there is no hope for the kind of listening and patience and understanding and openness to correction that relationships require. — John Piper

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

There was something in the color white that resembled silence. Both were emptied of life. — Elif Shafak

But this was like old movies, the silent theater haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouths opening to let moonlight smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could hear the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks. — Ray Bradbury

I now had the pleasure of her company 24/7.
Joy.
Kit broke the awkward silence. "This looks delicious, honey. You've done it again." Grinning, he raised his fork in a mock salute.
My dad, the dork.
I suppressed a sigh. If this silly, white-gloved dingbat made my father happy - and I knew she did - it was my solemn duty as his progeny to suffer it. — Kathy Reichs

You are the silence between the notes. The white space between the letters. The missing that makes everything else a something. — Pleasefindthis

Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling. — Alice Munro

She was trembling, and so was he. Like the first time, he thought. For her. For him. And just as
terrifying and tremendous.
The late winter sun was a white wash of light through the windows. In the silence of the house he
could hear every catch of her breath. When he skimmed his fingers lightly over her, she was all soft
skin and quivers.
Smooth. Warm. Beautiful. — Nora Roberts

And every day there is music. One dark voice will start a phrase, half-sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be singing. The voices are dark in the golden glare, the music intricately blended, both somber and joyful. The music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright. Then slowly the music will sink down until at last there remains one lonely voice, then a great hoarse breath, the sun, the sound of the picks in the silence.
And what kind of gang is this that can make such music? Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this country. Just twelve mortal men who are together. — Carson McCullers

In the black chaos where the seas and the skies become confused let the projectors blow their white trumpets of silence
("Roundness") — Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

It isn't silence you can cut with a knife any more, it's interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage. — E.B. White

And evasions." Now the voice sounded faintly abashed. "I'm sorry, Miss Mason. We didn't think ... just a moment." The intercom clicked off, leaving me in silence once again. I stayed where I was, and kept waiting. The sound of a hydraulic lock unsealing broke the quiet. I turned to see a small panel slide open above the door, revealing a red light. It turned green and the door slid smoothly open, revealing a skinny, nervous-looking man in a white lab coat, eyes wide — Mira Grant

We know that Rangi can at least mutter because Digger Gibson says he used to talk to the bear. In his group home for orphaned Moa boys, Rangi had a pet cinnamon bear. I saw her once. She was just a wet-nosed cub, a cuff of pure white around her neck. Rangi found her on the banks of the Waitiki River and walked her around on a leash. He filed her claws and fed her tiny, smelly fishes. They shot her the day his new father, Digger, came to pick him up.
"Burying that bear," I overheard Digger tell Mr. Oamaru once. "The first thing we ever did together as father and son."
Rangi's given us this global silent treatment ever since, a silence he extends to people, animals, ice. — Karen Russell

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence. — Jacob M. Appel

In this silence of the white Host, carried in the Monstrance, are all His words; there is His whole life given in offering to the Father for each of us; there is also the glory of the glorified body, which started with the Resurrection, and still continues in Heavenly union. — Pope John Paul II

In the meantime the strike is over, with a remarkably low loss of life. All is quiet, they report, all is quiet.
In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools. — Alan Paton

The silence is death.
It comes each day with its shock
to sit on my shoulder, a white bird,
and peck at the black eyes
and the vibrating red muscle
of my mouth. — Anne Sexton