if you want people to leave you alone you should act crazy.

there's often more in silences than in what is actually said — in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight.

I will say you ... You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But its no good, because I know you can't.

I long for periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythyms of transience as if into bed.

Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable.

The hard silence between frustrated people always feels cluttered. But holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read. When we hike by ourselves, we hear a silence still pristine with crunching leaves and birdsong. Silence can be a system of peace, which is mercy, easily offered to a friend needing quiet, harder when the person is one's own annoying self.

I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. . . . I writhed with the effort to stay silent. . . . Since Jax's birth my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.

I think having my life be as private and quiet as possible is a way in which then I can go and play characters.

You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.