Words

The way this world works, people are very apt to use the words they speak not so much as a way of revealing but, rather, as a way of concealing who they really are and what they really think, and that is why more than a few moments of silence with people we do not know well are apt to make us so tense and uneasy.  Stripped of our verbal camouflage, we feel unarmed against the world and vulnerable, so we start babbling about anything just to keep the silence at bay.  But if we can bear to let it be, silence, of course, can be communion at a very deep level indeed.

–Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, 1969.