“Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”

“You're a chimp off the old block”

“Married silence is a specific kind of silence, typically one in which the woman goes mute while the man pretends as if it's perfectly normal that she hasn't spoken in hours.”

“In the final analysis, superstitions, omens, and intuitions are the reflections of a conscious effort on the part of an individual to detect the subtle signals sent to us from the natural world. If we are convinced that the life and matter around us are mute, then we are confined to the silence of the scientifically concrete. If we are open to subtlety, then the world resonates with significance.”

“Murdering a mute to silence him is overkill.”

“They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.”