50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Tag: Silence

April 9, 2018 /

“My nerves often get the better of me: it is especially on Sundays that I feel rotten. The atmosphere is so oppressive, and sleepy and as heavy as lead. You don’t hear a single bird singing outside, and a deadly close silence hangs everywhere, catching hold of me as if it will drag me down deep into an underworld.

At such times Daddy, Mummy, and Margot leave me cold. I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird whose wings have been clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage. ‘Go outside, laugh, and take a breath of fresh air,’ a voice cries within me, but I don’t even feel a response any more, I go and lie on the divan and sleep, to make the time pass more quickly, and the stillness and the terrible fear, because there is no way of killing them.”

—from The Diary of Anne Frank on Friday, 29 Oct. 1943

March 22, 2018 /

“Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly between gulps of water, one by one by one.

At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.

. . .

It was completely dark.

I felt the darkness, but nothing else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a stone wall and the moaning stopped.

The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone.

A cool wind rushed by. I was being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth. Then the wind stopped. There was a rumbling, as of many voices, protesting and disagreeing in the distance. Then the voices stopped.

A chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped shut on it again. I tried to roll away from the direction of the light, but hands wrapped round my limbs like mummy hands, and I couldn’t move.

I began to think I was in an underground chamber, lit by blinding lights, and that the chamber was full of people who for some reason were holding me down. Then the chisel struck again, and the light leapt into my head, and through the thick, warm, furry dark, a voice cried,

“Mother!”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

March 8, 2018 /

“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. This city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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