Quotes About Silence In Music

“The kind of music that God must hearing, no matter how busy or distracted, because it comes out of hundreds of square Miles of nothingness, out of the emptiness of the hills and the silence of the moors ...”

— Simon Armitage

“He is remembering," I say.
"Remembering what?"
"It's a word I use for praying. Sometimes it's like waiting for music to come out of the silence.”

— Francisco X. Stork

“Before the Battle:
Music of whispering trees
Hushed by the broad-winged breeze
Where shaken water gleams;
And evening radiance falling
With reedy bird-notes calling.
O bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams.
I have no need to pray
That fear may pass away;
I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight
That summons me from cool
Silence of marsh and pool,
And yellow lilies islanded in light.
O river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night.”

— Siegfried Sassoon

“Ede had been pregnant not quite the full term: eight months, two weeks, four days. She had lapsed into an extended silence - partly because she was still in mourning - still enraged and afraid of speech. And partly, too, because the child itself had taken up dreaming in her belly - dreaming and, Ede was certain, singing. Not singing songs a person knew, of course. Nothing Ede could recognize. But songs for certain. Music - with a tune to it. Evocative. A song about self. A song about place. As if a bird had sung it, sitting in a tree at the edge of a field. Or high in the air above a field. A hovering song. Of recognition.”

— Timothy Findley

“Music is the silence between the notes.”

— Claude Debussy

“My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.”

— Anna Kamieska

“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

— Marcel Marceau

“There was an exceeding good concert, but too much talking to hear it well. Indeed I am quite astonished to find how little music is attended to in silence; for, though every body seems to admire, hardly any body listens.”

— Fanny Burney

“The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“The library smells like old books - a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks.”

— Laura Whitcomb

“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.”

— Robert Fripp

“Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken.”

— Robert Fripp

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

— Aldous Huxley

“I became the very air; I was full of stars. I was the soaring spaces between the spires of the cathedral, the solemn breath of chimneys, a whispered prayer upon the winter wind. I was silence,and I was music, one clear transcendent chord rising toward Heaven. I believed, then, that I would have risen bodily into the sky but for the anchor of his hand in my hair and his round soft perfect mouth.”

— Rachel Hartman

“When we sing, I am one of many, and the individual me evaporates. I am one of 23 university choir members. Not a professor. Not an American. Not a 46-year-old in the midst of twentysomethings. Not a woman trying to outpace the aspects of self she has yet to make oeace with. I am simply what we all are
another voice, a set of lungs, some vocal chords and someone who finds joy and comfort in singing. But when the music stops, so does the we. The union dissolves. The silence transforms first person plural into first person singular.”

— Laura Kelly

“Her ability to hear music in the silence.”

— Gayle Forman

“After that, I became kind of fascinated by her and by what I guessed was her ability to hear music in the silence. Back then, I'd wanted to be able to do that, too. So I took to watching her play, and though I told myself the reason for my attention was because she was as dedicated a musician as I was and that she was cute, the truth was that I also wanted to understand what she heard in the silence.”

— Gayle Forman

“Can we be grateful for music, silence, kind words, beautiful words, art, blank canvasses, space, night, sun, rain, amazing plants, animals..”

— Jay Woodman

“Even in the most beautiful music there are some silences, which are there so we can witness the importance of silence.”

— Andrea Bocelli

“And the rain drops kept falling like the sweetest music
leaving tears on the glass,
which is what music does to me
most of the time
but silence too. and rain.”

— Charlotte Eriksson

“You can do beautiful things with your friends; you can do beautiful things when you are all alone! In togetherness, listen to the music of the crowds; in solitude, listen to the music of the silence! Be neither afraid of the crowds, nor of the loneliness, because both are blessings!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“I decided to make spaghetti for lunch again. Not that I was the least bit hungry. But I couldn't just go on sitting on the sofa, waiting for the phone to ring. I had to move my body, to begin working toward some goal. I put water in a pot, turned on the gas, and until it boiled I would make tomato sauce while listening to an FM broadcast. The radio was playing an unaccompanied violin sonata by Bach. The performance itself was excellent, but there was something annoying about it. I didn't know whether this was the fault of the violinist or of my own present state of mind, but I turned off the music and went on cooking in silence. I heated the olive oil, put garlic in the pan, and added minced onions. When these began to brown, I added the tomatoes that I had chopped and strained. It was good to be cutting things and frying things like this. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that I could feel in my hands. I liked the sounds and the smells.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I have to have music on when writing, or else the silence swallows me whole.”

— Sarah J. Maas

“Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.”

— Walter Murch

“Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?
: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“And every day there is music. One dark voice will start a phrase, half-sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be singing. The voices are dark in the golden glare, the music intricately blended, both somber and joyful. The music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright. Then slowly the music will sink down until at last there remains one lonely voice, then a great hoarse breath, the sun, the sound of the picks in the silence.
And what kind of gang is this that can make such music? Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this country. Just twelve mortal men who are together.”

— Carson McCullers

“Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills,-with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance,-the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment,-that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it
everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The elders say- difficult to prove- that winged creatures also dream. The birds are lovers of heights, always searching out landing spots, never constant here at the foot of the human race. 'It's that they discovered a magical advantage ... ' they say, 'the sound of silence.'
At the foot of the clouds the raindrops come earlier, it's true, and the silence of the sky is something unattainable for those who don't fly- we have never experimented. The dream of the birds was that man of them headed for a land where they experienced a similar magic to that lived by them.
In the final analysis, music is the only human sound similar to that of silence.”

— Ondjaki

“Like Nietzsche, I believe that without music, life would be a mistake. Nothing but silence says it better.”

— Linda Ellerbee

“Several things can throw me into that space where I feel energetic and peaceful at the same moment - often things that force me to utilize all my senses. Sunshine does it for me. Music for sure, singing, and dancing. Conscious breathing. Nature. Silence. Meditation. Sport is a great one.”

— Richard Brancatisano

“It has been said with some meaning that if men would but rest in silence, they might always hear the music of the spheres.”

— Arthur Helps

“Dance is the music of our body, sound is the rhythm of our feeling, silence is the symphony of our soul.”

— Nelly Mazloum

“Laughter is a holy thing. It is as sacred as music and silence
and solemnity, maybe more sacred. Laughter is like a prayer, like
a bridge over which creatures tiptoe to meet each other. Laughter
is like mercy; it heals. When you can laugh at yourself, you are
free.”

— Ted Loder

“The Best Music you can ever hear in your Life is Silence
silence of yourself, silence of your loved ones”

— Vinay Kumar

“If music is sound & came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.”

— Keith Jarrett

“We have two lives;
The soul of man is like the rolling world,
One half in day, the other dipt in night;
The one has music and the flying cloud,
The other, silence and the wakeful stars.”

— Alexander Smith

“I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea.
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence for which music alone finds the word.”

— Edgar Lee Masters

“The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.”

— John Cage

“If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.”

— Thomas Merton

“I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.”

— Tod Machover

“Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.”

— Wallace Stevens

“When it comes, you'll be dreaming that you don't need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it's part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.”

— Wislawa Szymborska

“Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.”

— Robert Fripp