posts tagged "silence"

"a silence that almost had a scent”
-Richard Brautigan, from “Lovers"

    You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
    This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.
-Leonard Cohen, “Gift”

"If we are silent for long enough,

we could start over.”
-Cyril Wong, from “A Kind Of Hush"

"the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.”
-Wendell Berry, from “The Silence"

“I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.”
-Sylvia Plath, from “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
-Marianne Moore, from “Silence"

"And as we stray further from love
We multiply the words,
Words and sentences long and orderly.
Had we remained together
We could have become a silence.”
-Yehuda Amichai, (trans. Assia Gutmann) from “Quick and Bitter"

"Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains
speaking in a language I remembered but could no longer understand.

Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time,
I had no body — only a sense of silence and distance and calm.

It was as if I had just woken from all water into dream.
-Gerard Van der Leun, from “Pure Mathematics"

"In the future the word for image will be word and the word for word won’t be a word but just silence.”
-Thomas Sayers Ellis, from “Selected Lens Caps"

"Her cry silences whole vocabularies of names for things.”

           —Susan Howe

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