What Is Told and What Is Left Unsaid
Inspired by Virginia Woolf and Gabriel García Márquez
“I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don't say.”
— Virginia Woolf(The Voyage Out, 1915)
“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”
— Gabriel García Márquez(A phrase often cited in relation to Márquez's reflections on fiction and narrative.)
Between silence and story lies the strange terrain of human experience, where truths go unspoken and fictions are born to fill the void.
Virginia Woolf yearned to write about silence, about the unsaid, the quiet tremors that shape a life more deeply than loud declarations ever could. She understood that literature does not merely document what is said; it amplifies the quiet things we fail to say.
The novel, in her vision, becomes a vessel for pauses, glances, and the inward shiver of doubt. It is there in what remains unspoken that the soul reveals itself.
On the other hand, Gabriel García Márquez reminds us that fiction was born the moment we dared to explain our absences with wonder. By metaphorically highlighting when Jonah returned home and claimed a whale swallowed him, he wasn’t just crafting a tale, he was protecting something, perhaps awe, perhaps shame‽
The story became a shield, or maybe a bridge, between experience and acceptance.
So we oscillate, between hiding in silence and covering with story. One restrains, the other embellishes. But both are forms of survival.
We remain creatures of fiction and silence, carrying inner monologues that never find words, and outward tales that stretch beyond the truth.
What we don’t say often defines us.
What we invent allows us to live with it.