Mute Quotes - Page 3

• But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

  Herman Melville

  Joy, Down And, Woe

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.366

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• We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Life, Games, Would Be

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• Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.

  Jean-Dominique Bauby

  Laughter, Fate, Blow

  Jean-Dominique Bauby (2008). “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, p.25, Knopf Group E-Books

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• C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute.

  Robert Adams

  What Matters, Way, Belief

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

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• Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Running, Spring, Lying

  Czeslaw Milosz, “Forget”

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• The Little Mute Boy The little boy was looking for his voice. (The king of the crickets had it.) In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. I do not want it for speaking with; I will make a ring of it so that he may wear my silence on his little finger In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. (The captive voice, far away, put on a cricket's clothes.) Translated by William S. Merwin

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Kings, Boys, Voice

  Federico Garcia Lorca, “The Little Mute Boy”

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• The people who are abroad are all those that have no religion, neither one based on speculation nor one received by tradition. Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those in our country who are like these. I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, and a mental faculty above that of the monkey.

  Maimonides

  Country, Religious, Animal

  Moses Maimonides (1961). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.384, Courier Corporation

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• When you look into the faces of these quiet creatures who don't know how to tell stories--who are mute, who can't make themselves heard, who fade into the woodwork, who only think of the perfect answer after the fact, after they're back at home, who can never think of a story that anyone else will find interesting--is there not more depth and more meaning in them? You can see every letter of every untold story swimming on their faces, and all the signs of silence, dejection, and even defeat. You can even imagine your own face in those faces, can't you?

  Orhan Pamuk

  Home, Swimming, Thinking

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• Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Sadness, Joy, Feelings

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• Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

  Annie Dillard

  Block, Silence, World

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.65, Canongate Books

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• No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

  Karen Russell

  Kids, Animal, Self

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• Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room." Ma says it but on mute. I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.

  Emma Donoghue

  Goodbye, Doors, Looks

  Emma Donoghue (2015). “Room: Picador Classic”, p.225, Pan Macmillan

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• I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King's white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you - I swear that.

  Patricia A. McKillip

  Beautiful, Kings, Memories

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• the mute protest in your own bones

  George Orwell

  Bones, Protest

  George Orwell (2014). “1984”, p.60, Arcturus Publishing

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• C’mon, sweetie, you can say it. (Delphine) (She moved his mouth playfully with her hands.) You don’t suck, Delphine. I…you. C’mon, Jericho. I only bite in the bedroom. You can do this. I know you’re not really mute. (Delphine)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Hands, Mouths, Bedroom

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• Have I missed a national holiday? There must be celebrations in the streets for you to be home at this hour of the day." "I'm calling it Summerset Goes Mute Day. The city's gone mad with joy.

  Nora Roberts

  Home, Holiday, Cities

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• Say she rail; why, I'll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly wash'd with dew. Say she be mute and will not speak a word; Then I'll commend her volubility, and say she uttereth piercing eloquence.

  William Shakespeare

  Morning, Rose, Dew

  'The Taming Of The Shrew' (1592) act 2, sc. 1, l. 171

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• Real dudes move in silence...like a mute drivin a new hybrid.

  Ryan Montgomery

  Real, Rap, Moving

  Song: Writer's Block

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• At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.

  Mary Renault

  Eye, Blue, Games

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• You are the Essence of the Essence, The intoxication of Love. I long to sing Your Praises but stand mute with the agony of wishing in my heart !

  Rumi

  Spiritual, Heart, Essence

  Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi, “The Agony And Ecstasy”

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• We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.

  Annie Dillard

  Mind, Stones, Watches

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.67, Canongate Books

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• Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Littles, Phantoms

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.204, Virginia Woolf

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• Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

  Pablo Neruda

  Autumn, Moon, Tunnels

  Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XXV”

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• The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.

  Thomas Mann

  Adventure, Sadness, Men

  Thomas Mann (1999). “Death in Venice, Tonio Kroger, and Other Writings: Thomas Mann”, p.115, A&C Black

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• Interested in some ‘undercover’ work? And to think, I was actually having a tender thought about you. Do yourself a favor, Steele…Become mute.

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Thinking, Favors, Undercover

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2005). “Bad Attitude”, p.232, Simon and Schuster

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