“The Silence took your friend."Nobody says What’s the Silence?Satan Says, "It is a creature that came out of the walm. Large as a lake, this creature,but it’s not made of water. It is made of sound. And it feeds off of sound, or anythingthat makes sound, or anything that can hear sound. It will empty this entire world ofsound if we let it. It claims this side of town its territory. Anybody that’s out on the streetis at risk. It will eat anything that it hears and your friend must have been something itheard. He will never come back. Nobody ever escapes from the stomach of Silence.”

“Who would have imagine that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?”

“Father’s silence is not merely the absence of sound. It’s a creature with a life of its own. It chokes you. It pinches you small as a grain of rice. It twists in your gut like a worm. Silence clawed at my throat. It left a taste of burnt matches.”

“Assurance"You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellowpulls across the hills and thrums, or in the silence after lightning before it says its names-and then the clouds' wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles-you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head- that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. The whole wide world pours down.”

“Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.”

“When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.”