“More and more I found myself at a loss for words and didn’t want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone”
– Paula McLain, The Paris Wife
“Love, the warmth of bodies in contact, is the only mercy shown to us in the darkness. But the only union is that of the organs, and it can’t bridge over the cleavage made by speech. Yet they unite in order to produce beings to stand by them in their hopeless isolation. And the generations look coldly into each other’s eyes. If you cram a ship full to bursting with human bodies, they all freeze with loneliness.”
– Bertold Brecht, In the Jungle of Cities
“… of course natural language is meaningless. Even in my most optimistic moments I can only conclude that conversation merely exists to disguise the fact that we are all going to die… No doubt following this lecture you will all exist mostly in silence.”
– Maurice Clint, 2001 or so, Belfast, in a maths lecture
“Language only lives in and through human culture, which on the one hand needs mutual understanding but on the other hand makes direct communication impossible. […] People who use language lose their primitive desires which, however sinful, remain close to the self. Frightened by solitude, their only home, they become automata, slaves of the monster-machine of public relations.”
– Brouwer, Life, Art, and Mysticism
“The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?”
– Ecclesiastes 6:11
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
Doesn’t make any sense.”
– Rumi
“Vows are spoken
To be broken
Feelings are intense
Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable
[…]
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm”
– Depeche Mode, Enjoy the Silence
“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Silence is sexy
Silence is sexy
So sexy
So silence
Silence is sexy
Silence is sexy
So sexy
So sexy”
-From Silence is Sexy by Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten
Woke up this morning and my head was in a daze,
Brave new world had dawned upon the human race,
Words are meaningless and everything’s surreal,
Gonna have to reach my friends to find out how I feel,
And if I taste the honey, is it really sweet?
And do I eat it with my hands or with my feet?
Does anybody really listen when I speak or will I have to say it all again next week?
– Shakespears Sister, Hello (Turn Your Radio On)
And it’s not enough
To tell me that you care,
When we both know the words are empty air.
– Calvin Harris, Sweet Nothing
We are spendthrifts with words,
We squander them,
Toss them like pennies in the air—
Arrogant words,
Angry words,
Cruel words,
Comradely words,
Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear.
But the slowly wrought words of love
And the thunderous words of heartbreak—
These we hoard.
– Words, by Pauli Murray