“I had learned by personal experience that grumblers are deaf to any voices but their own.”
“As grumblers go, Stubble was in a league of his own.”
“Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.”
“Yo, yo, yo, check it out," said PJ, with enough hand gestures that any deaf person watching would have thought he had ASL Tourette's syndrome”
“You won't find the word happy in any self-respecting grumbler's dictionary, no matter it's Christmas Eve or the any other day.”
“It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing.”