...of a son's corpse

The sky seemed somehow airless - as though all the air had been pumped out and there was nothing but dry dust over her head. And the pump was continuing its work: together with the air, faith and hope had now disappeared; nothing was left but a small mound of grey, frozen earth.

Everything living - her mother, Nadya, Viktor's eyes, the bulletins about the course of the war - had ceased to exist.

Everything living had become inanimate. In the whole wide world only Tolya was still alive. But what silence there was all around him. Did he realise that she had come...?

[Life and Fate, Grossman, V.]

...of unloading coffins

The soldiers of a labour battalion, conscripts who were too old for active service, were unloading coffins from a truck. You could tell from their silence and lack of haste that they were used to this work. One man stood in the back of the truck and pushed a coffin to the rear; another man put his shoulder beneath it and took a few paces forward; a third walked silently up and took the other end of the coffin on his shoulder. Their boots squeaked on the frozen earth as they carried the coffins to the wide communal grave, laid them down beside it and returned to the truck. When the empty truck set off for the city, the soldiers sat down on the coffins and rolled cigarettes, using lots of paper and a small amount of tobacco.

[Life and Fate, Grossman, V.]

...of a soldier's soul

Byerozkin often compared the battle for Stalingrad with what he had been through during the previous year of the war. He knew it was only the peace and silence within him that enabled him to endure this stress. As for the soldiers, they were able to eat soup, repair their boots, carve spoons and discuss their wives and commanding officers at a time when it might well seem impossible to feel anything except fury, horror and exhaustion. Byerozkin knew very well that the man with no quiet at the bottom of his soul was unable to endure for long, however courageous he might be in combat. He thought of fear or cowardice, on the other hand, as something temporary, something that could be cured as easily as a cold.

[Life and Fate, Grossman, V.]

...of Soviet prisoners-of-war

[...........................................................................................................]

The Soviet prisoners-of-war were unable even to agree among themselves: some were ready to die rather than betray their country, while others considered joining up with Vlasov. The more they talked and argued, the less they understood each other. In the end they fell silent, full of mutual contempt and hatred.

And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in the medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century.

[Life and Fate, Grossman, V.]

...of a prelude to a kiss

They sat there for a long while in silence; the beer had got to Liza's head, and the warm night air filled her with a double intoxication. She felt the arm round her waist, and the big, heavy form pressing against her side; she experienced again the curious sensation as if her heart was about to burst, and it choked her - a feeling so oppressive and painful that it almost made her feel sick. Her hands began to tremble, and her breathing grew rapid, as though she were suffocating. Almost fainting, she swayed over towards the man, and a cold shiver ran through her from top to toe. Jim bent over her, and, taking her in both arms, he pressed his lips to hers in a long, passionate kiss. At last, panting for breath, she turned her head away and groaned.

[Liza of Lambeth, Maugham, W. S.]

...of a Briton's picnic

Then they all set to. Pork-pies, saveloys, sausages, cold potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, cold bacon, veal, ham, crabs and shrimps, cheese, butter, cold suet-puddings and treacle, gooseberry-tarts, cherry-tarts, butter, bread, more sausages, and yet again pork-pies! They devoured the provisions like ravening beasts, stolidly, silently, earnestly, in large mouthfuls which they shoved down their throats unmasticated. The intelligent foreigner seeing them thus dispose of their food would have understood why England is a great nation. He would have understood why Britons never, never will be slaves. They never stopped except to drink, and then at each gulp they emptied their glass; no helltaps! And still they ate, and still they drank - but as all things must cease, they stopped at last, and a long sigh of content broke from their two-and-thirty throats.

[Liza of Lambeth, Maugham, W. S.]

...of a Saturday night

She sat, leaning her head on her hands, breathing in the fresh air and feeling a certain exquisite sense of peacefulness which she was not used to. It was Saturday evening, and she thankfully remembered that there would be no factory on the morrow; she was glad to rest. Somehow she felt a little tired, perhaps it was through the excitement of the afternoon, and she enjoyed the quietness of the evening. It seemed so tranquil and still; the silence filled her with a strange delight, she felt as if she could sit there all through the night looking out into the cool, dark street, and up heavenwards at the stars. She was very happy, but yet at the same time experienced a strange new sensation of melancholy, and she almost wished to cry.

[Liza of Lambeth, Maugham, W. S.]

...of the king's speech

"To the great three words I want to add a fourth," he said, "so that henceforth the motto of the French shall be 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Opportunity.'"

The king his head still down, waited for applause, and when none came he looked out over the thunderstruck gathering. The delegates were hypnotised with horror. They stared glassily back at the king. They seemed scarcely to breathe.

Pippin IV had planned to bow at this point and to leave with dignity on the heels of his applause, but there was only aching silence. Uproar he could have understood. He had even prepared himself for denunciation, but the silence held him and confused him. He took off his pince-nez and mounted it on his forefinger.

[The Short Reign of Pippin IV, Steinbeck, J.]

...of a king

In this manner the king learned what was in store for France, what plans were being made. He sat silently and listened while Socialists proved that Communists must be outlawed, while Centrists showed beyond doubt that only if the financial backbone of France was bolstered and defended could prosperity trickle down to the lower orders. Religionists and anti-Religionists each made their irrefutable points.

The king listened silently. And he emerged depressed.

Pippin's mind often sought shelter in the memory of his little balcony in the Avenue de Marigny. He could see and feel the dark and silent sky and the slow-flailing nebulae.

[The Short Reign of Pippin IV, Steinbeck, J.]

...of astronomy

It is said that Number One together with its coach house, was built as the Paris headquarters of the Knights of St. John, but it is presently owned and occupied by a noble French family who for a number of years have leased the converted coach house, the use of the courtyard, and half of the flat connecting roof to M. Pippin Arnulf Heristal and his family, consisting of his wife Marie, and his daughter, Clotilde. Soon after leasing the stable house, M. Heristal called on his noble landlord and requested permission to set up the base and mount for an eight-inch refracting telescope on the portion of the flat roof to which he had access. This request was granted, and thereafter, since M. Heristal was prompt with the rent, intercourse between the two families was limited to formal greetings when they happened to meet in the courtyard, which of course was guarded by heavy iron bars on the street side. Heristal and landlord shared a concierge, a brooding provincial, who after years of living in Paris still refused to believe in it. And there were never any complaints from the noble landlord, since M. Heristal's celestial hobby was carried out at night and silently. The passions of astronomy, however, are no less profound because they are not noisy.

[The Short Reign of Pippin IV, Steinbeck, J.]

...of party leaders

M. le Duc was so surprised that he had been able to say all of this that he sat down and had to be reminded that he had not arrived at the point. Once reminded, however, he graciously arose again. He suggested, even commanded, that the monarchy be restored so that France might rise again like the phoenix out of the ashes of the Republic to cast her light over the world. He ended his address in tears and immediately left the room, crying to the Gardes Republicains at the gates of the palace, "I have failed! I have failed!" But, indeed, as everyone knows, he had not failed.

The announcement by the Duc des Troisfronts had the effect of shocking the party leaders to silence. Every man seemed frozen within himself. only very gradually did a series of whispered conferences begin. Party leaders collected in knots and spoke together in low tones, glancing occasionally over their shoulders.

[The Short Reign of Pippin IV, Steinbeck, J.]

...of persistence

He wanted to ask her why she was resisting him, but he could not speak. Kristyna was so shy, so delicate, that love's functions lost their names in her presence. He dared use only the language of breathing and touching. Weren't they beyond the heaviness of words? Wasn't he burning within her? They were both burning with the same flame! And so, in stubborn silence, he kept attempting with his knee to force open Kristyna's tightly closed thighs.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of audible beauty

I think Thomas Mann sounded that "faint, clear, metallic tone" to create silence. He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was death-beauty), and for beauty to be perceptible, it needs a minimal degree of silence (of which the precise measure is the sound made made by a golden ring falling into a silver basin).

(Yes, I realise you don't know what I'm talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise - the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music - we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.)

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of freedom

On the first morning after their flight, when they awoke in a small hotel in an Alpine village and realised that they were alone, cut off from the world where all of their lives had been spent, she experienced a feeling of liberation and relief. They were in the mountains, marvellously alone. Around them unbelievable silence reigned. Tamina welcomed that silence as an unexpected gift, leading her to reflect that her husband had left his homeland to escape persecution and she to find silence; silence for her husband and for herself; silence for love.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of ostriches

There were six of them. When they caught sight of Tamina and Hugo, they ran towards them. Now bunched up and pressing against the fence, they stretched out their long necks, stared, and opened their straight, broad bills. They opened and closed them feverishly, with unbelievable speed, as if they were trying to outtalk one another. But those bills were hopelessly mute, making not the slightest sound.

The ostriches were like messengers who had learned an important message by heart but whose vocal cords had been cut by the enemy on the way; so that when they reached their destination, they could do no more than move their voiceless mouths.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of submission

But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don't know, and it's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ears of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the force occupying her ear, never saying "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of precaution

The young man (everything about him indicated he was R.'s fiance) looked around with great caution. He clearly thought the police had hidden microphones in my apartment. With silent nods we agreed to go outside. We walked at first in continuing silence, and only when we entered the din of the Narodni Avenue did he tell me that R. wished to see me and that a friend of his whom I didn't know, had offered to lend his apartment in a suburb for this secret meeting.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of forgetting

Besides, Mama was very glad to have met this new relative. She was a very nice girl. (And it was incredible how she reminded her of someone, but who?) For a good two hours, Mama had answered her questions. How did Mama wear her hair as a girl? She had a braid. Of course, it was still in the old days of Austria-Hungary. Vienna was the capital. Mama went to a Czech high school, and Mama was a patriot. And all of a sudden she had longed to sing them some of the patriotic songs they sang at that time. Or to recite the poems! She surely still knew many of them by heart. Right after the war (yes, of course, after the 1914 war, in 1918, when the Czechoslovak Republic was established, my God, the cousin didn't even know when the Republic was proclaimed!), Mama had recited a poem at a school ceremony. They were celebrating the end of the Austrian Empire. They were celebrating independence! And would you believe it, all of a sudden, having come to the last stanza, her mind went blank; she couldn't remember what followed. She fell silent, sweat ran down her brow, she thought she would die of shame. And then all at once, unexpectedly, there was a great burst of applause! Everybody thought the poem was over, nobody noticed the last stanza was missing! Even so, Mama was in despair, and, ashamed, she ran and locked herself in the toilet and the principal rushed to find her and kept banging on the door, begging her not to cry and to come out, because she had been a great success.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of an anniversary

Russia, which had composed the enormous fugue for the entire terrestrial globe, could not tolerate the scattering of the notes. On August 21, 1968, she sent an army of half a million men to Bohemia. Soon about one hundred twenty thousand Czechs had left the country, and of those who remained, about five hundred thousand had been forced to leave their jobs, for isolated workshops in the depths of the country, for distant factories, for the steering wheels of trucks - that is to say, for places where no one would hear their voices.

And because not even the shadow of a bad memory should distract the country from its restored idyll, both the Prague Spring and the arrival of the Russian tanks, that stain on a beautiful history, had to be reduced to nothing. That is why today in Bohemia the August 21 anniversary goes by silently and the names of those who rose up against their own youth are carefully erased from the country's memory, like mistakes in a schoolchild's homework.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]

...of unemployment

It was the same story everywhere. He returned home in the evening; his heart sank as he turned into his street behind the Market. His wife would invariably be standing at the door with the children behind her, looking down the street. What anxious eager faces they had! So much of trembling, hesitating hope in their faces. They seemed always to hope that he would come back home with some magic fulfilment. As he remembered the futile way in which he searched for a job, and the finality with which people dismissed him, he wished that his wife and children had less trust in him. His wife looked at his face, understood and turned in without uttering a word; the children took the cue and filed in silently. Rama Rao tried to improve matters with a forced heartiness. 'Well, well. How are we all today?' To which he received mumbling, feeble responses from his wife and children. It rent his heart to see them in this condition. At the Extension how this girl would sparkle with flowers and a bright dress; she had friendly neighbours, a women's club and everything to keep her happy there. But now she hardly had the heart or the need to change in the evenings, for she spent all her time cooped up in the kitchen. And then the children. The house in the Extension had a compound and they romped about with a dozen other children; it was possible to have numerous friends in the fashionable nursery school. But here the children had no friends and could play only in the back yard of the house. Their shirts were beginning to show tears and frays. Formerly they were given new clothes once in three months. Rama Rao lay in bed and spent sleepless nights over it.

[Out of Business, Narayan, R. K.]