...of ignorance

Your right: his silence is deafening. It's the silence of the primeval forest, heavy with menace. It surprises me at times, the obstinacy with which our uncommunicative friend insists on giving the cold shoulder to every civilised language. His work involves serving sailors of all nationalities in this bar - which for some reason or other, though we're in Amsterdam, he calls Mexico City. With a job like that, wouldn't you think his ignorance might be a burden to him? Imagine Cro-Magnon Man taking rooms in the Tower of Babel. He'd feel a little out of his element, to say the least. But no, this fellow doesn't feel like an exile, he just carries on regardless.

[The Fall, Camut, A]

...of thought

For a long time we walked on very quickly and in silence. Everything I might have said was checked beforehand by what I felt she was thinking; I dreaded to provoke some sentence which might set both our fates trembling in the balance. And as I thought of what Martins had said as to the possibility of her regaining her sight, a dreadful anxiety gripped me.

[La Symphonie Pastorale, Gide, A.]

...of shock

The ensuing silence seemed indeterminable, as though the night had stopped dead. I wanted to run but couldn't move. I was trembling, I think, with cold and shock. I told myself I had to act quickly, nut I felt an irresistible weakness flood through my body. I forget what I thought at that moment. "Too late, too far away..." or something like that. I kept on listening, not moving. Then, slowly, I walked away through the rain. I reported the incident to no one.

[The Fall, Camut, A.]

...of disagreement

No answer. Obviously not. In the silence worry took over again. Not about what had happened, nor about what might still happen later on tonight, but about tomorrow, after we had slept it off. No precedent to guide me in judging how one picked up the old threads again in the morning. Nothing behind us to refer to. This, to me, had seemed an advantage in the beginning. A clean slate on which to start, everything spanking new. It was up to us, exclusively, to make something out of it. But doubts flocking in now. Victor was a stranger to me, he did not think or feel as I did.

[Shadow Game, Power, M.]

...of plague

Under a moonlit sky, its whitish walls and regular streets extended in straight lines, never broken by the black shape of a tree, never disturbed by the steps of a passer-by or the howl of a dog. The silent town was henceforth a heap of massive motionless cubes between which the mute statues of forgotten benefactors or former great men, stifled for ever in bronze, were left alone trying with their imitation faces in stone or iron to suggest a degraded image of what man used to be. These mediocre idols reigned beneath a heavy sky on lifeless crossroads, unfeeling brutes who evoked rather well, the state of immobility into which we had drifted - or at least its final state, that of a necropolis in which plague, stone and night would finally have silenced every voice.

[The Plague, Camut, A.]

...of God

"After all..." the doctor continued, hesitating again and looking closely at Tarrou. "And this is something that a man like yourself might understand; since the order of the world is governed by death, perhaps it is better for God that we should not believe in Him and struggle with all our strength against death, without raising our eyes to heaven and to His silence.

[The Plague, Camut, A.]

...of outside

But the staccato sound of metallic heels on the asphalt, approaching steadily along the rectilinear street, ringing out more and more clearly in the dead calm of the frozen night, the sound of heels cannot reach this place, nor can any other noise from outside. The street is too long, the curtains too thick, the house too high. No noise, not even muffled, ever penetrates the walls of the room, no vibration, no breath of air, and in the silence minute particles float slowly down, hardly visible in the light from the lampshade, gently down, vertically, always at the same speed, and the fine grey dust settles in an even layer on the parquet floor, the counterpane, the furniture.

[In The Labyrinth, Robbe-Grillet, A.]