silence

Give me a literary love that doesn't need words, that flows like silent water and speaks to the bone. There I lose myself in the fantasy.

When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak be our silent statement.

and only when that happens do you realise just how much silence there really is. Silence between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in betweens and everything which isn__ an answer.

It felt like I was living in two worlds. There was one world which was a daylight world and another dark world (though I'm not saying that everything bad happened in darkness because it didn't). In the daylight world, life had a veneer of normality - my mum was a bit violent, my dad was a bit distant, my big brother was in hospital somewhere, my little brother was always with Mum, and I had an uncle who was very loving and caring and did nice things for me. In this daylight world, I went to church and learned about Jesus. I was told about innocence and how He loves children. Then there was the other side, the dark world, which was almost a mirror image. But what I was getting taught there was all of the opposites.It was almost the reverse of Christianity. They would say that the Christian teachings were rubbish, and everything in the Kirk was right. they would sing a hymn - not like 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' but something about being strong. The hymns were quite Germanic, with harsh, aggressive chanting. They were always about power and strength and right. When they were singing I would be standing or sitting with whoever had taken me.

On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers_ hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar.

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

The handless clock trying to holdthe hour of death, saltin the last mouthful of water.The windows opaque with silence,silence stagnating in the wineglass.

They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.

What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread

Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn__ have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do.There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time__ power even over this__hich, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments_ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge__o, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence__f that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert.But the still life resides in absolute silence.Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we__e invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard.But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life__his knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife__nd, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented.These things exist__f indeed they are still around at all__n time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife__ pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?

A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.

To write,_ Marguerite Duras remarked, __s also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

When you're silent, your silence condones it. Thus, whatever you believe in goes down the drain.

I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.

And then something happened. It was a fragment of time, a breath of time. It was like being in a car in pouring rain and driving under an overpass, and for just that second there is a profound, powerful sense of reprieve- the utter silence of non-rain.

Because it is so hard, some people wait until they are in their thirties, forties, fifties, or even older before breaking their silence.

Silence has built walls, walls that I attempt to break by pedaling faster, only to be imprisoned a hundred feet down the road.

They still didn__ talk on the bus, but it had become a less confrontational silence. Almost friendly. (But not quite.)