Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Interpretation
Silenced thoughts and emotions will eventually demand expression, even if subtly.
This quote by Margaret Atwood highlights the inevitability of unexpressed feelings and ideas emerging from silence. When certain truths or emotions are repressed, they may not voice themselves overtly but will seek acknowledgment in quieter, often more insistent ways, suggesting the importance of open communication and self-expression.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of expressing one's feelings.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?
To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.
I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.
No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between a man and a plot of land.
In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.
There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.
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