...of hiding

All at once an unknown grip had Tarabas by the scruff of his neck; it closed on him, strangled him, lifted him up. The pain and the force of it were too much. His own grip slackened. He looked round no more. He neither looked nor saw another thing. Suddenly fear had caught him. With strong shoves he parted the crowd, tumult still in his ears, immense vague terror in his breast. With great leaps he bound across the street, pursuers and shouts and the shrill whistle of a policeman in his wake. He ran. He felt himself running. He ran as though he had six pairs of legs, magnificent power in thighs and feet, freedom before his eyes, death at his back. He ran into a side street, and threw a glance behind. No sign of his hunters. He fled into a dark doorway, cowered behind the staircase, saw and heard the pursuing horde speed past the house. People were coming downstairs. He held his breath. An eternity, it seemed to him, he crouched there in silence.

[Tarabas: A Guest On Earth, Roth, J.]

...of opium

The doctor came, with his beard three hand's-breadths long, and prescribed opium to me. What a marvellous remedy for the pains of my existence! Whenever I smoked opium my ideas acquired grandeur, subtlety, magic and sublimity and I moved into another sphere beyond the boundaries of the ordinary world. My thoughts were freed from the weight of material reality and soared towards an empyrean of tranquility and silence. I felt as though I was borne on the wings of a golden bat and ranged through a radiant, empty world with no obstacle to block my progress. So profound and delicious was the sensation I experienced that the delight it gave me was stronger than death itself.

[The Blind Owl, Hedayat, S.]

...of despair

There was complete silence everywhere. I felt that all mankind had rejected me and I took refuge with inanimate things. I was conscious of a relationship between me and the pulsation of nature, between me and the profound night which had descended upon my spirit. This silence is a language which we do not understand. My head began to swim, in a kind of intoxication. A sensation of nausea came over me and my legs felt weak. I experienced a sense of infinite weariness. I went into a cemetery beside the road and sat down upon a gravestone. I held my head between my hands and tried to think steadily of the situation I was in.

[The Blind Owl, Hedayat, S.]

...of a somnambulist

Was she ill? Had she lost her way? She had come like a sleepwalker, independently of any will of her own. No one can possibly imagine the sensations I experienced at that moment. I felt a kind of delicious, ineffable pain. No, it was not an illusion. This being who without surprise and without a word had come into my room was that woman, that girl. I had always imagined that our first meeting would be like this. My state of mind was that of a man in an infinitely deep sleep. One must be plunged in profound sleep in order to behold such a dream as this. The silence had for me the force of eternal life; for on the plane of eternity without beginning and without end there is no such thing as speech.

[The Blind Owl, Hedayat, S.]

...of rapture

Afterwards, hurrying, he helped her to dress and wrap herself up in the plaid. In the twilight her black eyes and black hair, tied up in a braid, were fabulously visible. He did not dare touch her any more, he only kissed her hands and stayed silent out of unendurable happiness. All the time it seemed that there was someone there in the darkness of the wood on the shore, which glimmered in places with glow-worms, someone standing and listening. At times something would give out a cautious rustling there.

[Rusya, Bunin, I.]

...of fisherman's boats

Sometimes someone would speak in a boat. But most of the boats were silent except for the dip of the oars. They spread apart after they were out of the mouth of the harbour and each one headed for the part of the ocean where he hoped to find fish. The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean. He saw the phosphorescence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of the ocean that the fisherman called the great well because there was a sudden deep of seven hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl the current made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean. Here there were concentrations of shrimp and bait fish and sometimes schools of squid in the deepest holes and these rose close to the surface at night where all the wandering fish fed on them.

[The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway, E.]

...of a mother in law

Neither Brian nor Laura remembered much of the hours after that. If they hoped that had broken Edna’s silence permanently, they soon found they were wrong. Edna was just as silent as ever the next morning, Sunday, though she did smile a little as if nothing happened.

Brian went to work on Monday as usual, and when he came home, Laura told him that Edna had been unusually busy all day. She had also been silent.

[The Silent Mother in Law, Highsmith, P.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.