Like Silence But Not Empty

The rest is silence.

—Hamlet

Silence is a rest!

—Christie

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

—Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”

—Ansel Adams

“In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.”

—Rumi

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

—Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

—Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”

—Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

—W.B. Yeats

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

—Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all memory.”

—Dejan Stojanovic

(Off to a silent retreat, this second day of summer.  Then silent for the rest of the weekend, communing with the Pacific at Pt. Reyes.  Back Tuesday.)

image:  She Who Is