Quotations about Silence

"...you have a plaine rule against it; 'I permit not a woman to teach' (1 Timothy 2:12). "

-- Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy: 1636-1638

"If speaking is of silver, silence is of gold."

-- Tunisian proverb

They don't say any of these things to me in front of others, even other children: whatever is going on is going on in secret, among the four of us only.  Secrecy is impotant, I know that: to vilate it would be the greatest, the irreparable sin.  If I tell I will be cast out forever.

But Cordelia doesn't do these things or have this power over me because she's my enemy.  Far from it... Cordelia is my friend.  She likes me.  She wants to help me, they all do.  They are my friends, my girl friends, my best friends.  I have never had any before and I'm terrified of losing them. I want to please.

Hatred would have been easier. WIth hatred, I would have known what to do.  Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

-- Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye

According to the custom of the time, all the education a girl needed was enough Hebrew to enable her to stumble thought her prayers; enough Yiddish to enable her to write a letter and to somehow read the [Yiddish Bible for Women]; a rudimentary idea of arithmethic and instruction in the special duties of a Jewish woman . . .

-- Miriam Shomer Zunser in Daughters of the Shtetl

No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.

-- Alice Walker

XVIII

     I, being born a woman and distressed
     By all the needs and notions of my kind,
     Am urged by your propinquity to find
     Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
     To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
     So subtly is the fume of life designed,
     To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
    And leave me once again undone, possessed.
    Think not for this, however, the poor treason
   Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
   I shall remember you with love, or season
  My scorn with pity, -- let me make it plain:
   I find this frenzy insufficient reason
   For conversation when we meet again.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
 

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

--Virginia Woolf

Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.

--Lois Wyse

When a man gets up to speak, people listen then look.  When a woman gets up, people look' then, if they like what they see, they listen.

--Pauline Frederick

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And None can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.

--Gwendolyn Brooks