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Peace and quiet

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I just awoke in the peace and quiet of the night. I decided to write. It is 111am. I like both the words peace and quiet. They both have 2 consonants and 3 vowels. They are both 5 letters long. P and q are neighbors in the alphabet and mirror each other. What else can I say about peace and quiet? P and q are at the upper ends of the qwerty keyboard. What else? If I remove one e from both words I get pace and quit. Movement and stoppage. Peace can be seen as an active journey while quiet is a gentle surrender.

How about a quiet quote? My friend Chatty tells me that, "Peace is the melody; quiet is the pause that lets it play." My friend says that peace is like the gentle song of inner calm that exists within us, while quiet is the silence and stillness that allows us to actually hear it. Just as music needs pauses to give it rhythm and meaning, peace needs quiet to be felt and recognized. Without quiet, peace might still exist—but it would be drowned out by the noise of the world.

How about a quiet joke? I went searching for peace and quiet jokes online but ended up laughing out loud. What do you call a joke that gets the silent treatment? A quiet quip that quit. The quintessential quandary. Not quite funny. Let me quit joking while I am ahead of the queue. Language is quirky. What more can I say about "peace and quiet"? It is a seventeenth-century tautological pairing that combines two near-synonyms for emphasis and rhythm, uniting inner calm with outward stillness in a single soothing phrase.
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