I have learned now that while those who speak about ones miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

When I was young I used to listen to other people and to try and understand what they thought and where they were coming from. I listened and didn't speak.

I wanted to stand up and shout that this was unfair, but loud voices were not permitted in the library.

Thus we might not know we have a sage at the table, for he will remain silent while the "experts" prattle on and on.

LISTEN twice as much as you speak.

You don't have to say everything to say something.

Things that are done, it is needless to speak about...things that are past, it is needless to blame.

I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best! I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.

Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death.

Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. "You have it pretty good.

If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.

My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency.