At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.

Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole - - -

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

...But the child's sob in silence curses deeper / Than the strong man in his wrath.

I was brought up in a house where there was a great deal of silence.

He spoke through a silence

He is small who hides in order to show himself.

My life is marked by long silences.

Silence is the surest resolve for him who distrusts himself.

The leafless orchard
Is alone day and night
With his pure and sad silence.

His silence made him feel ashamed, as if by keeping quiet he was mocking the others. And like a punishment there grew, alongside his shame, a feeling of loneliness. Teodoro was a man set apart, silenced by a secret.

out of the mountain of his soul comes a keen pure silence

He doesn’t answer. I can’t stand these little silences from him. They’re too loud.

The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.