“She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey.”

“There was a time when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents' voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in under the door and thorugh the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood...The accumulated resentsmnets of their life were always phrased in the language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness.”

“To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.”

“And he discovered, finally, the source of the honey-sweet sound.The sound was music.The sound was King Phillip playing his guitar and singing for his daughter, the Princess Pea, every night before she fell asleep.Hidden in a hole in the wall of the princess's bedroom, the mouse listened with all his heart. The sound of the King's music made Despereaux's soul grow large and light inside of him.Oh," he said, "it sounds like heaven. It smells like honey.”

“Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table - Nicaragua!”

“And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind’s ear, “…quite enough for everybody at present,” she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words…”