Glen Duncan Quotes

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

A small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on the wall.

The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

When I started working with mirrors, it seemed to be the perfect material to stand in for that waiting.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

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

Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation, of silence. Waiting for our Lord to be born. A pregnant woman is so happy, so content. She lives in such a garment of silence, and it is as though she were listening to hear the stir of life within her. One always hears that stirring compared to the rustling of a bird in the hand. But the intentness which which one awaits such stirring is like nothing so much as a blanket of silence.

If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience. The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky. Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests, and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.

Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard.

He says a million things without saying a word. I have never heard a more eloquent silence.

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

When in doubt, stand still.

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth.

You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.

“Who are you?” One who has waited long for you to speak.

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

The silence wasn't like the ones I'd known lately, though: it wasn't empty as much as chosen. There's a entirely different feel to quiet when you're with some-one else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

No man can give me any word but Wait.

When mouths close, it’s because there’s something important to be said.