Mute Quotes - Page 8

• I don't think [governments] use [religious repression ] as a weapon, they use it as a as a means of - of oppression. To stifle opposition. To mute resistance.

  Elie Wiesel

  Religious, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.savetibet.org

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• Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Skeletons, Dancing, Funeral

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2445, Delphi Classics

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• The mute grain turns to love songs when swallowed by the nightingale.

  Khalil Gibran

  Song, Grain, Turns

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• True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Prayer, Communication, Inward

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• To me, dance is an extraordinary thing, more extraordinary than most people usually think. Dance preceded writing, speaking and music. When mute people speak their body language, it is true speaking rather than handicap, this is the first word and the first writing. Thus to me, the body is fundamental.

  Paul Virilio

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: ctheory.net

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• Half the stuff I've written was written when I was half asleep watching the David Letterman show when some boring actress was on talking about herself. I would just mute the TV, look over to the computer and start plugging in notes. Then the next morning you go "Wow, I like this". I'd almost forget what I did, and then it would inspire me to go on and do the next thing. That's what I do. Just kind of follow my own little thing.

  Terry Bozzio

  Morning, Talking, Inspire

  Source: beintheloopchicago.com

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• We like to assume that language is a purely human property, our exclusive possession, and that everything else is basically mute.

  David Abram

  Assuming, Language, Possession

  Interview with Derrick Jensen, www.derrickjensen.org. July 1, 2000.

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• Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

  William Gibson

  Running, Baby, Eye

  William Gibson (2003). “Idoru”, p.32, Penguin

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• Why to mute fish should'st thou thyself discoverAnd not to me, thy no less silent lover?

  Abraham Cowley

  Lovers, Silent, Should

  Abraham Cowley (1779). “The Works of the English Poets. With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Samuel Johnson”, p.320

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• What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts indeed, sometimes from no facts in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Interesting, Facts, Becoming

  Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter (2010). “The Light of Other Days”, p.206, Macmillan

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• O have a care of natures that are mute!

  George Meredith

  Care

  George Meredith (1922). “The Complete Works of George Meredith”, p.8031, Library of Alexandria

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• A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Poetry, Fruit, Should

  'Ars Poetica' (1926)

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• Oh, where is man That mortal god, that hath no mortal kin Or like on earth? Shall Nature's orator The interpreter of all her mystic strains Shall he be mute in Nature's jubilee?

  Hartley Coleridge

  Men, Jubilee, Earth

  Hartley Coleridge, Derwent Coleridge (1851). “Poems”, p.285

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• The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute; if you burned them all together you'd get close to the truth.

  Conor Oberst

  Together, Blind, Deaf

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• A babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart.

  William Wordsworth

  Mother, Heart, Babe

  1799-1805 The Prelude, bk.2, l.267-8 (published 1850).

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• None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Love, Heart, Eye

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.34

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• Universal violence compels the language to be mute . . . . Silence is not only a metaphor of Hemingway's work; it is also the source of its formal excellence, its integrity.

  Ihab Hassan

  Integrity, Silence, Excellence

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• And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.

  James Agee

  Stars, Lying, Winter

  James Agee (2008). “A Death in the Family”, p.66, Penguin

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• How still the morning of the hallow'd day! Mute is the voice of rural labour, hush'd The ploughboy's whistle, and the milkmaid's song.

  James Grahame

  Song, Morning, Voice

  Henry Kirke White, James Grahame (1856). “The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White and James Grahame”, p.216

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• Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

  Ben Okri

  Expression, Silence, Enemy

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• The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.

  Cesare Pavese

  Dark, Night, Old Wounds

  Cesare Pavese, Geoffrey Brock (2002). “Disaffections: complete poems 1930-1950”, Copper Canyon Pr

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• I want to know a butcher paints, A baker rhymes for his pursuit, Candlestick-maker much acquaints His soul with song, or, haply mute, Blows out his brains upon the flute.

  Robert Browning

  Song, Blow, Soul

  'Shop' (1876) st. 21

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• If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

  Patricia Hampl

  Sports, Book, Reading

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• Hasidism has a tradition that one of man's purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by "hallowing" the things of creation. By a tremendous heave of his spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into that rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. Keeping the subsoil world under trees in mind, in intelligence, is the least I can do.

  Annie Dillard

  Uplifting, Men, Fire

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.96, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• ... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Two, Silence, Three

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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