The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

And then there was silence, deep, awful silence, which chilled me.

From my silence, only my voice is missing.

Every day that I said nothing the silence became more and more necessary. The silence was as still as stagnant water. The silence stung like sudden hailstones. The silence sowed doubt and created words which were never spoken.

My life is marked by long silences.

I defend
Not my voice, but my silence

To me so deep a silence portends some dread event; a clamorous sorrow wastes itself in sound.

What is it about silence that makes people uneasy?

Then she broke down, for with the cessation of activity came an unexpected terror — silence. She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her — it did kill many thousands of people outright. Ever since her birth she had been surrounded by the steady hum. It was to the ear what artificial air was to the lungs, and agonizing pains shot across her head. And scarcely knowing what she did, she stumbled forward and pressed the unfamiliar button, the one that opened the door of her cell.

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.

The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.

Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.

Silence is like starvation.

Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.