Doris Grumbach

Talk uses up ideas. ... Once I have spoken them aloud they are lost to me dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them like bulbs in the rich soil of silence do they grow.

The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.