John Steinbeck Quotes

Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

Time seems to stop in certain places.

Before the invader sound was born, the Universe was silent and shall be again.

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.

Silence is more musical than any song.

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Life stand still here.

There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

Then everything was still. Absolutely still.

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

She was lying like a loaf of bread. I said, baby, baby, baby, are you dead?

What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence.

It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.

Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is.

In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.

We do not realize the sound the world makes -- unless, of course, it comes to a stop. Then, when it starts, it sounds like an orchestra.

I am interested in silences

The master action, to move forward is a form of inaction; being still and quiet.

I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

They'd been standing like that for thirty seconds of forever.

The greatest sound in the theater is silence.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life