Terry Tempest Williams Quotes About Silence
-
I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.
→ -
When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.
→ -
We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, “Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.
→ -
To hold silence and to be silenced are two very different experiences. And so another theme emerges, that of light and shadow. When we share our voice, who benefits? When we withhold, who benefits? And what are the consequences and costs of both?
→ -
There are different qualities of silence. There's the silence that sustains us, as women, that nourishes us, the silence where I believe our true voice, our authentic voice, dwells. But there's also the silence that censors us, that tells us what we have to say does not want to be heard, should not be heard, has no value. And that if we speak, it will be at our own peril. This kind of silence is deadly. This kind of silence is deadening to who we are as women. And when a woman is silenced, the world is silenced. When a woman speaks, there is an opening.
→ -
I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33”, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page.
→ -
Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace.
→
Related Authors
-
John Burroughs Essayist -
Pam Houston Author -
John McPhee Writer -
Rick Bass Writer -
Gary Snyder Poet -
Tim DeChristopher Activist -
Edward Abbey Author -
Rachel Carson Marine biologist -
Rebecca Solnit Writer -
Doug Peacock Author -
Barbara Kingsolver Novelist -
Gretel Ehrlich Writer -
Wallace Stegner Historian -
David Wroblewski Novelist -
Barry Lopez Author -
Aldo Leopold Author -
Leslie Marmon Silko Writer -
Richard Jefferies Writer -
Peter Matthiessen Novelist -
Annie Dillard Author