...of intuition

Bel-Gazou doesn't persist either, she just carries on sewing. She sews and superimposes on the work that she neglects images and associations of names and persons, all the results of patient observation. A little later, other curiosities will come along, other questions, but above all other silences. If only Bel-Gazou were an innocent child, filled with amazement, always asking questions straight out, her eyes wide open!... But she's too close to the truth, and too natural not to know from birth that the whole of nature hesitates in the face of that majestic and murky of all instincts, and it is right to tremble, to keep silent and to lie when we come too close to its secret.

[Claudine's House, Colette, S-G.]

...of a spinster

And after that, nothing more happened to young Bouilloux. The Parisians never returned, and nor did any other Parisian visitors. Houette, Honce, the Leriche boy, the commercial travellers with golden watch-chains dangling across their bellies, the soldiers on leave and the bailiff's clerks climbed up our steep street in vain, at the hours when she strode down it, an elegantly coiffured seamstress who passed by with a straight back and a mere nod. They waited for her at dances, where she drank lemonade with an air of distinction and replied to all requests, 'Many thanks, but I'm not dancing, I'm too tired'. Their feelings were hurt, and after a few days, they started to say, with a snigger, 'She's tired all right - she's got the kind of tiredness that lasts thirty-six weeks!' and they kept a sharp eye on her stomach... But nothing happened to young Bouilloux, neither that nor anything else. She was waiting, that was all. She was waiting, imbued by a proud faith, fully aware of what she was owed by the random destiny that had forearmed her so well. She was waiting for... that Parisian in white serge? No. The stranger, the ravisher. Her proud wait made her pure and silent, and she turned down, with a little smile of surprise, Honce, who wished to elevate her to the rank of a legitimate chemist's wife, and the bailiff's senior clerk. Without ever abasing herself again, and retrieving in one go all the things she had thrown away on her doters - laughter, glances, the glowing bloom on her cheek, her small, red, childlike lips, and a bosom with barely a blue shadow of cleavage - she awaited her reign, and her unknown prince.

[Claudine's House, Colette, S-G.]

...of brave children

Tomorrow... Tomorrow, the eldest boy, slipping off the slate roof where he was setting up a water-tank, would break his collarbone and lie there, in polite silence, half-fainting, at the foot of the wall, waiting for someone to come and lift him up. Tomorrow the youngest would be whacked right in the middle of his forehead by a six-metre-long ladder; without a word of complaint, he would return home modestly bearing a purple bump as big as an egg between his eyes...

[Claudine's House, Colette, S-G.]

...of siblings

Nowhere. My mother would throw back her head and gaze up at the clouds, as if she expected a flock of winged children to come swooping down. After a while, she uttered the same cry, then grew weary of questioning the heavens, and with her fingernail broke open a dry poppy-head, scratched a rose-stem dotted with green aphids, dropped the first walnuts into her pocket, shook her head as she brooded over the vanished children, and went back into the house. Meanwhile, in the branches of a walnut tree above, there gleamed down the triangular face of a child lying stretched out like a tomcat along a thick branch, in silence. A less short-sighted mother might have realised that when the twin peaks of the two fir trees exchanged hasty bows, they were being shaken by more than merely the sudden gusts of October wind... And in the square dormer window, above the pulley for hauling up fodder, might she not have spotted, if she screwed up her eyes, those two pale patches standing out against the hay: the face of a young boy, and his book? But she had abandoned her attempt to find out where we were, she had given up any chance of reaching us. No shout or cry accompanied our strange turbulence. I do not think anyone has ever seen children that were livelier and yet more silent. Only now does this surprise me. Nobody had asked us to be so cheerfully mute, or so relatively unsociable. My brother, the one who was nineteen and built hydrotherapy apparatuses from sausage-shaped pieces of cloth, pieces of wire and glass tubes, never stopped his younger brother who was fourteen, from dismantling a watch, or making a faultless piano reduction of a melody or some symphonic piece he had heard in the nearby town - nor from taking an obscure pleasure in dotting the garden with little tombstones he had cut out of cardboard, each of which bore, under its cross, the names, the epitaph and the genealogy of some imaginary dead person... My sister, who wore her hair too long, could read for as long as she liked, without pausing for rest: the two boys would pass by her as if they did not see her, brushing past the young girl who just sat there, her mind enraptured and far away, without ever disturbing her. When I was little I could, if I wished, follow the boys, almost running after them as they strode along, plunging into the woods in pursuit of red admirals, swallowtails and purple emperors, or hunting for grass snakes, or gathering up armfuls of the tall July foxgloves that grew in the clearings deep in the woods, glowing red with pools of heather... But I tagged along in silence, and picked blackberries, wild cherries, or flowers; I explored the coppices and the waterlogged meadows like a dog who is free and doesn't owe anyone any explanation...

[Claudine's House, Colette, S-G.]

...of idols

After the guests had departed, the brothers remained alone in one of the rooms; alone, if one takes no account of pictures, gods and saints. Tunda was unaccustomed to these silent witnesses; and, for my part, I have no use for lackeys who stand behind my chair counting the hairs on my head. There would certainly have been lackeys in the conductor's house, had it not been for Frau Klara's social conscience. It was manifestly repugnant to her to degrade men so.

However, this was not the case with the gods.

[Flight Without End, Roth, J.]

...of the girl

The girl was beautiful and placid. She moved around as if cloaked in silence. Many animals engender such a silence in which they spend their lives, as if they had made a vow to serve some secret and elevated purpose. The girl was silent, her great brown eyes lay in dark blue pools, she walked as erect as if she carried a pitcher on her head, her hands lay always on her lap as if under an apron.

[Flight Without End, Roth, J.]

...of apathy

I never tried to meet Mertens. I felt a complex reluctance, of which aversion was only one component. Years ago I wrote him a letter; I told him that if Hitler had risen to power, devastated Europe and brought Germany to ruin, it was because many good German citizens behaved the way he did, trying not to see and keeping silent about what they did see. Mertens never answered me, and he died a few years later.

[Moments of Reprieve, Levi, P.]