The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that we lay down between our mind and things... Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world of silence, words to not separate us from the world nor from others, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.
~ from THOUGHTS IN SOLITUDE by Thomas Merton