There is the silence in which everything exists, and then there is the noise in my head that I have come to take as the natural background to my life. It has occurred to me that perhaps the trick is to begin to see the silence as the background and the noise as moving across it. The silence, the plain existence of things, is what is real; the thoughts are clouds.
The great solitaries always surprise us by their acute understanding of life. Prayer of positive, creative quality needs a background of silence, we need not hope to know the power of prayer