“He coughed out the words, which took shape of his cigarette stained teeth turned into birds bereft of wing. He stammered the bloodied words into the palm of his hand, polished them into clearness with a stainless handkerchief, and gifted them with wings, and sent silence, where all words uttered in the universe, and in all languages on the planet, are stored for all time, or forgotten forever.”

“He came up straight to her father, whose hands he took and wrung without a word - holding them in his for a minute or two, during which time his face, his eyes, his look, told of more sympathy than could be put into words.”

“Silence has its own language and in that silence he found words within himself; words for her, words for him and words for them.”

“God first created silence: whole, indivisible, complete. All creatures--man, woman, beast, insect, bird, and fish--lived happily together with this silence until one day man and woman lay down together and between them created the first word. This displeased God deeply and in anger she shook out her bag of words over the world, sprinkling and showering her creation with them. Her word store rained down upon all creatures, shattering forever the whole that once was silence. God cursed the world with words and forever after it would be a struggle for man and woman to return to the original silence. --Marlene Nourbese Philip”

“He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”

“When I was talking to Alfie I always knew exactly what he meant, but when I thought about his words later I could only grasp at the meaning like it was water running through my fingers, leaving the ghosts of utterances lying naked in the shapes of pools on my palms. I picked them to pieces, whispered them and cradled their shapes in my teeth just to hold them in the air later and string them together like pearls on a necklace. I wore it like a rosary, wrapping the pearls of his words around the knots in my fingers and counting all the ways we had tried to say the same thing and missed.”