I’m afraid of silence. Silence creates a pathway to peace through pain, the pain of a distracted and frantic mind before it becomes still…I fear silence because it leads me to myself, a self I may not wish to confront. It asks that I listen. And in listening I am taken to an unknown place. Silence leaves me alone in a place of feeling. It is not necessarily a place of comfort.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, by Terry Tempest Williams, p. 57