“There's no match for the silence of GOD.”

“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.”

“As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless.”

“At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.”

“There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.”

“Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.”

“There's a hurried intensity in the strokes--you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.”