Quiet Quotes

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“These are the few ways we can practice humility:

To speak as little as possible of one's self.

To mind one's own business.

Not to want to manage other people's affairs.

To avoid curiosity.

To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.

To pass over the mistakes of others.

To accept insults and injuries.

To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.

To be kind and gentle even under provocation.

Never to stand on one's dignity.

To choose always the hardest.”
― Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living

“The world is quiet here.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.”
― Gayle Forman, If I Stay

“I was quiet, but I was not blind.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The quiet sense of something lost”
― Tennyson

“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Just because you don't say much doesn't mean people don't notice you. It's actually the quiet ones who often draw the most attention. There's this constant whirlwind of motion and sound all around, and then there's the quiet one, the eye of the storm.”
― Amy Efaw, After

“There are very few friends that will lie down with you on empty streets in the middle of the night, without a word. No questions, no asking why, just quietly lay there with you, observing the stars, until you're ready to get back up on your feet again and walk the last bit home, softly holding your hand as a quiet way of saying “I'm here”.
It was a beautiful night.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. you can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. summer just opens the door and lets you out.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“We love the night and its quiet; and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds.”
― Fitz-James O'Brien, Classic Ghost Stories by Wilkie Collins, M.R. James, Charles Dickens and Others

“A Manifesto for Introverts

1. There's a word for 'people who are in their heads too much': thinkers.

2. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.

3. The next generation of quiet kids can and must be raised to know their own strengths.

4. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later.

5. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters.

6. One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.

7. It's OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.

8. 'Quiet leadership' is not an oxymoron.

9. Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.

10. 'In a gentle way, you can shake the world.' -Mahatma Gandhi”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.

Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.”
― Susan Cain

“But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?"
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I am a minimalist. I like saying the most with the least.”
― Bob Newhart

“The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“my love
for you
will always be
like a mountain stream.

quiet.
persistent.
continuous.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

“All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal

“No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“I hated the quiet. I could hear my fears that much louder for it.”
― Alwyn Hamilton, Traitor to the Throne

“People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close to silence they sometimes face their own reflections, their magnified shadows in the depths, and that frightens them. I know; I know.”
― Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind

“If talk is cheap, then being silent is expensive. And many people it seems, can't afford to buy into it.”
― Anthony Liccione

“About fireworks?
About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant. I imagine you do give Kathy love - in the true sense of the word. Whether or not she is capable of giving it back to you is another question.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower...I live still a collegiate student...and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world...aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Sometimes it is the quiet observer who sees the most.”
― Kathryn L. Nelson, Pemberley Manor